18.12.13

In Medea res

I'm in love with the way I mishear your words: in Medea res I thought you said on that voicemail, and my heart burst. I played it back over and over. There is just enough difference in our voices, just enough sameness in our beings, that these delicious little moments of othering our mutual language happen time and again.

Once I had a professor who was Israeli. We students were all in love with her voice, her inflections. When she said 'desire' something in me burned so brightly, as if the pilot light to my soul were suddenly kindled and would provide enough warmth for days. Others in the class also thrilled at this word, as I discovered once we began confiding in each other our excitement (well beyond the excitement over the content, existential philosophy and phenomenology, already quite exciting in itself to our ears and hearts).

Another, too, at that time spoke to me with a tongue that was like my own responding to me but with a different accent, so perfectly different. It is a seductive and uncanny thing, hearing oneself othered in someone else, feeling oneself spoken in another mouth. The other speaks with cadences that could never be mine, that alienate me from myself in the way finding a home outside oneself can. Such a transformative detour of our language, little tongues of difference to remind us of the difference at the heart of it all.   


10.5.13

one drop rule

And I am going about my life, and here we go, and all of that. I make statements. They sound convincing; they feel convicted. Look at me: I'm moving, moving...already moved on.

Just a drop, just one: a full-throated swig. It could be anything: wine, beer, whiskey. Just one drop and I begin an internal dialogue that no church marm could shush. One drop and I'm lost; no loud and proud chorus to bring me back to the fold. Oh, you...everything about you. Every little step is one I swore I wouldn't take.

Look, I tried. My honesty was better than my sincerity. It feels like pop lyrics in my head, like pop rocks in my heart. I don't want it, this explosion. I don't want to admit this liquid defeat. I'm going down with this ship.

17.4.13

upon waking

A couple of mornings ago I was awoken by one of my children calling for me. I had been in the middle of a dream, but I was aware of the fact of my dreaming. When the little voice penetrated into my awareness within the dream, I said with a sigh, "that's fine, I am tired of this dream anyway." Immediately I was fully awake and I jumped out of bed easily (I hate getting up, easily is never a word I would use to describe getting up on a typical morning). I was grateful for the interruption.

Everything about me lately is encapsulated in that tired sigh, that feeling of being done with this, that desire for something to penetrate into one kind of lucidity and break it up by introducing another, stronger clarity. I want to leap out of this bed, and yet, I also want to stay asleep, unconscious, as long as possible. I can only face this kind of fatigue through a haze of one kind or another.

29.3.13

Verdure

 I am in the city of verdure. It is not your city, and never was.  It was once mine, yet it's your ghost that haunts me now instead of any specter of my former self. My hotel room is voluminous. There are 3 full closets.  You could be, who knows, hiding in any one of them. Why not? Is that any more implausible than the fact that I am unable to imagine myself here without you? I go for a run and return to my room expecting to find you napping in the bed. A happy reversal for me as long as it ends in the same result: you and I entwined in smooth sheets, returning to each other from a place we've never gone, back to a home we've never had.

21.3.13

writing out

On tv shows featuring ERs and on those featuring zombies, you might hear someone shout, "He's bleeding out!". We all know what that means: he will soon have lost his life with his blood. How much blood is required to be out of the body before bleeding out becomes bled out, dead? My friends in the medical professions could tell me quickly and assuredly; this is a simple trivia question for them.

What if one is writing out instead of bleeding out? It has become clear to me that I must write my way out of this.  I must use will and force and desire and turn to my texts, turn this despair into something productive. Yet I don't feel like I can write my way out because I feel like I'm writing out.  All of my writing wants to circle back to this, to you, (to) my love. Every morning, as the idea of being awake slowly filters into my mind, I know I am fully awake when I am seized by two thoughts: first, he is there and I am not with him; second, maybe he wrote me? (No, the answer is always no; it's a futile question, but obviously futility hasn't yet worked its magic well enough to stop the question from arising, nor the dull hope accompanying it.)

17.3.13

Futility

"If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)”  --Barthes, Fragments of a Lover's Discourse

Never before have I felt so starkly the strength of a futile desire. Recognizing impossibility does not lead to ceding the desire, but rather to increasing the demand. I feed off of impossibility; my love grows fat in proportion to my dwindling hope. My desire resists all efforts at starvation, and relishes an exquisite meal of dusty crumbs that were swept away weeks ago.

15.3.13

Faux salut

Podcasts are a wondrous godsend. Podcasts are a terrible hell. Who would have ever thought that I would think "que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'importe" about voice recordings archived online? What hyperbolic twaddle, I know, I know.  But what I know doesn't stop what I feel; I'm a Rousseau through and through.

13.3.13

multiplicity of symptoms

The talk was about Deleuze and Badiou. It seemed quite interesting, but I wouldn't know because I zoned out early during the Badiou section. Or, rather, you zoned in, distracting my attention and fixing my pen into a doodle holding pattern that started to morph into ever larger interlocking circles and ovary-like appendages with the odd shaft or triangle. My mind flitted into the talk from time to time, my ears pricking up like a dog's whenever a concept dear or familiar to me sounded.

But mainly it was you--mostly it was us--walking arm in arm down all the streets of all the futures we won't have. Your wool and my wool, always winter, always requiring a cuddle against the outside world. For fuck's sake, I came *this close* to writing you a letter instead of haphazardly noting down snippets here and there. A crush note: "Dear M., I'm fucking crushed. Send help (in the form of your eternal love and whiskey)."

Can someone conceive a real pregnancy in place of what should have been a hysterical one? Is the repressed that potent, like a succubus arriving in the dead of night to dupe us all? Is my unconscious trying to live out one last tie to the Post Card, the child, the child. What to do with the doubly bastard child of the future. Darling, can't you see that I'm burning, I want to scream in the wake of your good-bye.

1.3.13

intermittent rain

How many post cards would I have written and hidden amongst your things if only I had no limits (on time or on sentiment?) Your bags and clothes would be littered with them. Cards in sleeves, pockets, and pants legs.

Endless greetings. We never stopped greeting each other, even at the end, did we?