i wonder how we will part ways. it haunts me, this curiosity. what will be the last thing you say to me? my final glance–of regret, gladness, uncertainty? i know these things don’t really matter–blasé as they are–but i keep an emotional tab on my romantic ventures, those digitally curated phenomena. so i don’t forget; can construct a system of valuation, nomination. either way. i wonder how it will be with you.
i read a cosmopolitan article about the “12 relationships every girl is glad she had.” i’m a hack for these “girl power” “rah rah” facades. call me a retrograde, white aspiring shadow of a planet–i am, as the shallow rack knows, guilty as charged. what isn’t so easy to dismiss is sympathy. i’m so glad you’re type number four: the one for whom “timing just wasn’t right.” of course, you and i know it wasn’t just timing that was at stake, but i probably would have ended up either a “professional artist” (of the private island variety), or a socialite with a cocaine addiction. maybe, somewhere between: anywhere, with a tragic flaw. to think that for a moment, i rested on the terror of the abject, before you shredded me with sans serif daggers. the possibilities of positivism: two bodies weighing on each other.
this is the recurring mare i dream: you, the subject; i, the witness neighing from afar. it does not take a genius to know that gravity is the only element of our relationship that promises reciprocity. in my dream, you called my mother a yellow monkey. i woke up with mouth agape. my suspicion of your less savory nature confirmed, internalized complexes unwrapped: motherhood, glass shards, dripping tongue. all this came rushing back when my mother asked me what “prime time” meant. of course, she was also the first and only person i called. how fortunate it is to flail against the current, always striving to turn the tide into some comprehensible stroke. some syncopated alphabet. i am against interpretation indeed–what luxury it must be to experience without the impetus of meaning-making (that stultifying effect meant to fossilize; monumentalize for the sake of desecration). what do i believe in? the ephemeral. the Real, without attachment.
what if, instead of depression, we just called it what it was. general feeling of listlessness; proclivity for casual sex; irresponsible behavior that inadvertently turns self-destructive; a plague of ennui; the symptom of negative fucks. fuck classification, categorization. my neurosis, like all neuroses, defies the charlatan’s feeble fingering. unlike most lovers, it is loyal. you will never shake the intimacy we’ve built: sleepless nights (and blazing afternoons). i wonder if–no more wondering. tragedy is not to be spun; loss is not to be caricatured and relived. what a masochistic ritual. i still dream of her soft kisses, knowing full well the shallow tenderness they beheld was due for evaporation at any moment. still, i could not stop dripping. warm blood on burnt concrete: a trail up the i-10 coast. i had successfully deluded myself into a chekhovian melodrama with a happy ending. so, really, a grimmsian tale. i had finally succeeded in deluding myself into thinking: i deserve it all. but of course, i don’t. the sentence of that narrative mold is romantic imprisonment: a duplicitous term that calls upon its victim to endure the pangs of empty desire, and then believe that vacuous longing to be worth writing about. to commemorate a vacuated mausoleum. to dance in the grave of a grave. can such deaths occur? can such living, postmortem, resurrect the spectral Real?
the more that i reference our body of text, the less likely my manifestation. i think the problem is: i am the book. how many artists speak only through marionettes of their work–metaphors of corpses, outcast, inlaid. what i mean is: the creation of this book is necessary for my living. which is to say, it is not quite “creation” that pens this book’s existential impetus, but the fact of its adjacency: as an extension of the glacial Real. look at me, writing of an entity whose ontological abstraction–the abstraction of an abstraction–can yet be verified. this book is an act: of catching up to the Real. i used to say that i will not write, that the articulation of a coherent belief system is a desire for destruction. to live in the Real is to abandon the pretenses of its capture: the temptations of falsity (which is the written simulacrum). to live in the Real: to anxiously circle one’s position against interpretation and its more innocuous cousin, signification.
but the Real is a series of events locked by dormant potential, so the artistic responsibility of experimentation is to resist dictation over the course of manifestation. to be open–and anticipate–the impossible futurities springing from the past. so to write as living: to mourn. to build a grave of a grave, and then lay to rest.
you want to force delicate, profound, vague, obscure, mysterious, voluptuous sensations into something. you can seize and violate. but will you caricature it? why do you want such clarity from me? . . . i never understood proust’s need to know, to be present, almost, when albertine was loving someone else.1
hung, over; hung, up on
hanging, on; hung, out to dry; hang, left to
overactive imagination; imagination, inactive to render manifestation. key: not to think about “it” too hard. let the subconscious rise above. “trust” the primordial urge. to watch the body; indulge in the cartesian paradox as the best way to “begin” and “end.”
“hung over”
semi private; curtains; semen; blades; fan; fingers (scissorhands); orphaned child
(photocopied umbilical cord); exhibitionist love making
“hung over”
[1] The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1
