Do not ars-longa-vita-brevis me! What will I have if I have you encased in the canvas of my words? What wages will I owe the eternal lines if I engrave your unending beauty in them? No, not today. There must be a limit to what the verb can move. May I live forever inferior as artist but never held back as man. Between ars and vita, let me always recall the nobler cause. Let me always distinguish the means from the ends.

I thank you for your final lesson dear strangers. My weakness prevails such that I can only know them now as mere lessons. I will keep what I have from you in the hope that someday I may gather from it the truly profound. Something worthy of you, though never to be worth anything to you. What would be the value of a shadow?

I still reel from our brief touching. Exactly the why or the how I cannot understand. Allow me please to keep the what that happened. For now, I succumb to words because I fail before them. Was it because of the first failure? Yes, maybe. We failed to save you! No long-winding art can ever cover that!

In pace recquiescat, dear young ones.