A Room of Pairs by Brendon Hagerman, Germany

How lonely can it get, lying on one bed of the double-decker shared with a roommate long ago but always seems like just this morning with all his first days marked on the wooden pillars and headboard that divides the dreamscape -- his moves and turns you still feel shaking you out of your nightmares, his spoken fantasies you still hear when you wake up with the smell of his breath. There is guilt in leaving and being left so you burn the junks that lost their pair to let out your own solitude. Life is this -- brings two souls together, declares them whole and young, as if the arms should be left and right to lift hopes of get-together, as if the chair should be here and there for two persons to speak and learn to love each other twice. To take all the stakes, a set of cards should be pairs of king and queen or the same suits of red. The pair's loss or a roommate's goodbye is another way to die, leaving a hollow in the floor left unfilled by the sand from the same shoes, or the river from the same dripping clothes during rain. A world beneath a bed with its new sheets and pillow cases lies between loneliness and remembrance -- memories may stop by, share the room but never turn on the same side, nor shake you from the same sweet sleep.