Emmi and Leo’s aborted meeting after Leo’s mother’s funeral

Emmi and Leo’s aborted meeting after Leo’s mother’s funeral begins as an invitation to turn an emotionally intimate correspondence into an encounter in person. Its cancellation, prompted by Leo’s need to spend the evening with his former girlfriend Marlene, leaves Emmi feeling rejected and makes Leo confront his fear that meeting could endanger the distinctive closeness he has found in her written presence. The event deepens their attachment even as it preserves the distance on which that attachment depends.

Invitation and arrangements

The possibility of meeting arises when Leo has been discussing his circumstances with Emmi. She assures him that he is not boring her and offers to meet, presenting herself as both near to him emotionally and peripheral to his everyday life. She proposes setting aside formality and meeting as old friends. The invitation makes explicit a tension already built into their correspondence: they feel close, but have not yet tested that closeness face to face.

Leo accepts and asks whether they can meet that evening. Emmi cannot make it, so she suggests the following day, around seven, at a café in the city center. Leo confirms that this time suits him despite the funeral scheduled for that day, and says he will write before five to settle the exact location. The plan is specific enough to feel imminent, but its final details remain deferred until a later message.

The canceled meeting

The next day, Leo writes that he must cancel that evening and promises to explain why the following day. He asks Emmi not to be angry and thanks her for her support. His note gives her neither the explanation nor the meeting they had planned; the delay leaves the reason temporarily unresolved.

In his later account, Leo says that he spent the evening with Marlene, his former girlfriend, who had also attended the funeral. She had loved his mother, and his mother had loved her. Leo describes Marlene as someone who can unlock parts of his awkward family history and who had reached his mother in ways he could not. On that evening, Marlene was distressed, and Leo comforted her. He says he preferred to support someone else rather than have people feel sorry for him, even though he sometimes kept his own self-pity private.

Leo also admits that he did not want Emmi to see him as he was then. He wanted her to meet him when he was in better shape, and wondered why he should draw a woman with no connection to his past into that difficult moment. His account thus gives the cancellation two connected causes: Marlene’s significance in relation to his family and his reluctance to appear vulnerable before Emmi. He closes by again thanking Emmi for the trust represented by her support.

Emmi’s sense of rejection

Emmi replies with respect for Leo’s loss but challenges the effect of his decision on her. She recalls that he had previously boasted of coming within a hair’s breadth of sleeping with someone, then contrasts that boast with his last-minute cancellation for the sake of an ex-girlfriend. Drawing on her own past experiences and on those of friends, she says she can picture how such a situation feels. If the evening with Marlene meant something entirely different, she allows, he will have to forgive her interpretation; nevertheless, she feels horribly rejected.

What hurts is not simply that the meeting did not happen. Emmi insists that she is not just anybody to Leo, and her response makes the emotional stakes of the invitation unmistakable: she had understood their closeness as giving her a particular place in his life. The cancellation therefore converts a practical change of plans into a conflict over whether the intimacy they share by email has weight beyond the correspondence.

The meeting Leo fears

Leo answers that Emmi is indeed not just anybody to him. He describes her as a second voice accompanying him through the day, changing an internal monologue into a dialogue. Her wit, charm, spirit, questions, challenges, and even what he calls her tastelessness enrich his emotional life. He says that exchanging a few apparently irrelevant words with her about his mother’s death had helped him greatly: the familiar voice had again questioned him, helped him find answers, and broken through his loneliness.

That renewed closeness makes him want Emmi beside him, and he acknowledges that their planned meeting might have changed everything. He imagines the secrets and puzzles disappearing as he pours out his family burdens; conversation would continue until both were exhausted, leaving disenchantment where magic and illusion had been. His questions about how they would look at each other, what they would see, and whether they would still write afterward express not indifference but fear of an irreversible change.

Leo says he is afraid of losing the Emmi voice and wants to preserve it with care. The explanation gives the aborted meeting its central paradox: he longs to be closer to Emmi, yet treats the distance between them as protection for the relationship. The meeting is canceled in the immediate aftermath of bereavement, but Leo’s account turns that cancellation into a statement about the limits and possibilities of their bond.

From written intimacy toward presence

The correspondence continues beyond the funeral episode, and its later exchanges show that the question of presence remains unsettled. In a midnight message, Leo stages an imagined evening for the two of them, describes the wine he is drinking, and asks Emmi to answer with what she is drinking. The message creates a shared scene through text rather than recording an actual meeting; intimacy remains something they can compose and answer at a distance.

Much later, the possibility of changing that distance returns through their voices. Leo asks whether they are going to go through with it, and then urges Emmi to come to him, promising that the encounter would involve no sex and that they could keep the lights off. He offers to pay for a taxi, gives his address, and proposes that he could instead come to her. His repeated reassurances and the effort to define exactly what the encounter would entail show how difficult it remains to translate imagined closeness into an agreed physical boundary.

Emmi does not go to him that night. She later explains that she tried to compose a message saying she could not come, but deleted it; she felt unable to tell Leo she would let him down because it would feel like letting herself down. She says something had happened to her and that she thinks she loves him, while believing Bernhard has sensed it. Immediately afterward, a delivery-status notice reports that the recipient’s email address has changed, that messages to it can no longer be received, and that incoming mail will be deleted automatically. The later exchange does not alter the facts of the funeral cancellation, but it sharpens its significance: the first missed meeting anticipates a recurring struggle between desire for contact and the risks of bringing the relationship into ordinary life.