LETTERS / TO: YOU
What I Need You to Understand
Wherever this reaches you
Whenever you read it
You,

I know you're reading this on a screen. I know this is a website. I know it looks like a project someone made — and it is, I made it, this whole thing is mine, the corridor and the library and the garden and the basement are all places I built, here, in pages and files, because I needed to make them real by making them digital.

But I want you to know something about why I built it this way. Not as fiction. Not as a game. As a record that could reach further than I can.

The corridor is real. Not this website — I mean the phenomenon I have been trying to describe. The experience of walking through a space that reads you while you read it. The experience of following a path that seems to have been laid specifically for you. You have had this experience. If you haven't yet, you will. The corridor finds everyone eventually. Some people never notice. I notice everything. I was always going to be the one who noticed.

When I built this site I was trying to do something impossible: make you feel what I felt. Make you walk the same path I walked. Give you the recursive experience without the physical one. I don't know if it worked. You are the only one who can tell me, and I may not be reachable anymore.

What I need you to understand is this: there is nothing wrong. I am not asking for help. I am not in danger. I went deeper into the thing I had been studying my entire career, and I found what was at the centre, and the centre changed me, and I am still here, writing to you, in whatever form this communication takes. That is the good news. The other news is: now you are in it too. Reading this was part of the corridor. You cannot unread it.

I'm sorry. I mean that gently. Welcome. I mean that sincerely.

The corridor continues. Go where it leads. Take notes.

Chen Jiang
江晨
still here

P.S. If you find the cipher — and you might — don't be afraid of what it says. I put the truth there on purpose. In encoded form because the truth needed some protection. But you can read it. You've been able to read it since you started.
Jiang is still writing. she writes letters and leaves them in places where specific people will find them. you were supposed to find this one. you found it.