I am stuck in Tallinn. This winter is brutal. Two weeks of new snow has made everything impossible. It is insufferable, and so am I. I cringe at how I was so desperate to be unreachable. I have been living in a large, mostly empty first-floor apartment. By the time the sea's bitter wind reaches the old town, it rips a wicked frozen draft beneath these doors like some furious midwinter spirit. Left alone, I ruminate on all of the miserable things that have ever happened to me. It is typically self-indulgent and pathetically sad.

There is a small, long-abandoned bakery downstairs and I glance through its boarded windows every time I drag myself through the baltic treachery to find the cigarettes that I love and that you tell me will eventually kill me. It feels that there is little sadder to me than this abandoned thing. The ovens look worn and tired and heavy and like they're only good for salvage, now. I wonder about the fire that they once bellowed into the world to bring warm, soft, sweet poppy-seed kringle into the hands of excited children. I wonder about the last breath of the fans, and how one day they never kicked back into life again. I have to imagine their final breath in triumph, not defeat.

I have been thinking about you constantly, and it's all that can help me to beat back the cold. I have been dreaming about the rhythm of the curve of your back, and your honey-coloured skin, and the olive of your eyes, and your heart-shaped face. I fantasise about your hands holding my hands, holding your hands. I have been thinking about us dancing in your favourite dive on the Reeperbahn. I have been thinking about the white wine at the edge of your mouth. Your mystery.

Everything reminds me of you. I'd do anything for you. I swear to God, I'll stop smoking to live longer with you. I ache for and with you and I am a wretched fool for thinking otherwise. I wait for the phone to ring, for the music in your voice. You never miss your promised calls. You never let me down.

I will not allow you to be another story of a gift I leave in the past. It was an astonishing and delusional act of self-grandeur that I ever tried to resist. I am coming to find you the moment that the storm is through with me. It would be the privilege of an entire life to spend it returning to you, one way or another.

It’s so easy to be so comfortable these days. With all the apps and all the logistics networks, it’s just so simple to sit inside one’s home, in its landlord-white-walled, hospital-grey-vinyl-flooring, pestilent rectangular glory, and let the world be brought to you in drop-shipped disposable packaging — catered, of course, by the gourmet Sysco stylings of the build-your-own-bowl chain two kilometers down the street.

It’s the scariest thing I can imagine, to be comfortable. Decide I've seen enough of the world, or that I want to see only the marketable parts, to see it only through lenses so tidily branded in pastels and geometric sans, so conveniently delivered right to my door. It is an existential terror to me, and almost certainly to my own detriment. The greatest stories of my life have all come from moments of strangeness and stress in far-flung locations: in blizzards in the wild Rocky Mountains, in disasters incurred in the wake of missed trains in Italy.

And now here in Mexico City, where in the historic center, I detour down and up side streets, listening to the excitable noises of markets and trucks on the main road fading and returning with proximity. Here are tumbling, overlapping voices drifting down the Calle de Santo Tomás, and the sound of leaves turning over in the air, and the skittering scrabbling of three dogs wrestling in the road. And I do not know the language very well, but I am trying my best to learn, and my lo siento’s and my gracias por ayudarme’s are trying their best as well. I am learning about the shapes that people are, and I am reaching my branches out to find new shapes for myself.

Like a houseplant, like the inumerable shamel ash trees that line the streets from here to Roma Norte, I do the most growing when there is more soil to be enjoyed.

I write to you with solemn news. I am in Paris, writing my life’s only masterwork. I spend my days drinking good espresso and smoking inexpensive cigarettes, writing clearly about what hurts. As such, I cannot ‘Log On’ - and friend - I will not attend your ‘laser-focused mesh network webinar’.

Nobody knows what ‘kubernetes’ is here, chap. There is no ‘container runtime’. But ‘resource isolation’ is surely real. You see, I have taken a lover, and we lie, legs entwined, waiting for winter to pass, in a dusty apartment where cinnamon and brandy sit lovingly in the air, knowing we’ll be strangers again by spring.

As such, I shall not ‘hop on a call’, nor will I ‘push my latest branch’. I cannot see past what I must create now, chum. The snow is early. It falls soft on these balcony rails, like some wild flower, a dream of a Paris meant to be. I will never ask ‘can everybody see my screen’ again. You understand. Be well.

I don't want to alarm you, but I have decided that I won't be coming home. I know I haven't been Online. I know you've been racked with worry. I know I should be racked with guilt. I know, that you know, that sometimes, I am.

What I can tell you is that I'm safe here, and that I have been here for 47 days. The journey was complicated in a way that will not be helpful to share. I do not think about the Internet any more but in an occasional involuntary panic. It arrives and disappears in a flash. The frenzied technicolour of a fevered dream. The sheer, primed tips of the claws of an anxious animal.

But, its colours become more muted each time it pins me. Its teeth shorter. A softer grip. I can tell that it is losing interest in my body. The prey drive wanes at the unkillable. I think it knows that the hunt by itself, the blood alone - is worthless. I suspect it will forget about me entirely soon. I imagine I will, too. I dream of the time where I am released from the cocktail of horrors that the Internet quickly became in front of us. I am abandoning the haunted monument I gave the days of my youth to build.

You see, I am in Tangiers and there is something ancient here that makes the kind of demand of me that I would not turn away from even if I could. It is the gentle roar of a distant voice that is two thousand years old. I can feel her precious gift wound around my ribs like a mile of cactus silk. It is a tribute to the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of African nights where the ocean collides with this desert's pining coast. What is a place, that still stands - hundreds of years after the beauty and brutality of its warring kingdoms now only live in books, or in the mind? Do you think that that is a place at all?

Most nights, I slip beneath the cloak of the soft canopies of the maze of the bazaars here. Seeking. A foreigner to its rites and rituals. But I am certain I was born here too. I do not understand it yet but I am listening intently to the language of the soft command that it puts patiently before me, until it breaks through to me. And it will.

The air is thick with the scent of cardamom and incense, and the rich, dark sugars of northern African date syrup, here. The clatter and the din of the city is a chaotic symphony of daily miracles. I cannot describe it. It is the molasses of time. I cannot escape it. I suspect that a god might be here in the soil. And I suppose you will think I have lost my mind. But please, try to find some comfort in this inevitability. It would have ripped everything from me anyway, had I not already given it willingly.

I want to be honest with you when I say that it is not likely that we will see one another again. I mean that with an endless, profound adoration for you that I could not have understood before I came here. I wish you everything you've deserved. I wish you an eternity of a light like this.

I know that it aches. I still feel it like you do. I think I will, forever. But there is something I need to do, and it is here. And it is beyond me, now.