The Asylum

Dear Ivan, is it possible to write a love letter to someone you have never met? I’m going to try in any case. I’ve only seen your picture in the newspapers, below those terrible, screaming headlines. Black and white photographs taken by the press to show ‘Ivan Rössel, the crazed child-killer’, or whatever it is they like to call you.

The pictures are harsh and unfair, but still I have spent a lot of time looking at them. There is something about the look in your eyes, so calm and wise and yet so penetrating. You seem to see the world as it is, and to see right through me. I would like you to be able to look at me in reality too. I would love to meet you.

Loneliness is a terrible thing, and unfortunately I have suffered my fair share of it over the years. I assume that you too must sometimes feel lonely, in your locked room behind the walls of the hospital. In the silence late at night, when no one else in the whole wide world is awake... It is so easy to be sucked in by loneliness, to be suffocated by it in the end.

I am enclosing a photograph of myself, taken on a hot, sunny day last summer. As you can see I have fair hair, but I like dark clothes. I hope you will want to look at this picture of me, just as I have looked at those pictures of you.

That’s all for now, but I would very much like to write to you again. I hope this letter reaches you on the other side of the wall. And I hope that you will somehow be able to send me a reply.

Is there anything I can do for you?

I’ll do anything, Ivan.

Anything at all.