untitled
We feel like we’re alive only through the painful excitation of our seventh sense, the sense of loss. There is a connection between love and being lost…
Hélène Cixous, The Love of the Wolf
At a cafe in Tinos, I sat with E, we were both despondent I don’t want to be right, she said I don’t want to be right, either I keep feeling like I’m going to have a final and resolute expression, that all this laboring to capture what I’m learning or learning to believe will reveal itself in a completed form. But I don’t know if that really happens, ever Nothing makes me feel more prey-like, more fleshy and exposed than being proven right. I’m still writing love letters that won’t ever see the light of day, I keep exploring what ever gestures and love crumbs I’ve mummified I keep examining all the cruelty I’ve pocketed, tears swallowed, expressions that were mangled in real time Things that have delighted and then ruined me And I still want to find some illuminating aspect of it all, but it won’t reveal itself to me, or I can’t quite flesh it out So I’ll keep trying, I guess This summer hasn’t been kind to me And I am affected deeply, deeply Everything hurts. When arriving in Athens after trekking from the airport, sweaty and exhausted, E commented upon seeing the book I was carrying, The Brothers Karamazov — Things must be bad, then We’re trying to clutch onto what is fleeting and ephemeral like catching light refracting in water. Trying to alchemically transform the intangible into the tangible. It just can’t happen, it actually might be a sinful pursuit I let myself admit the saddest things to myself, privately, that I can’t bear to say out loud. How I cry after I climax now, how I feel guilty for letting myself still remember what was good. How I wasn’t enough or was some how too much and very easy to hurt: I said I felt dead and like I was dying and the response came — “lol” Why do I need to burn it all down to know that there isn’t even an ember left in the wake of that kind of destruction that could be nursed back into a flame? I engulf what I love so severely and can’t tear myself away unless I’m completely eviscerated; I have to know its lost beyond all hope to even have a chance at living without it. No one is you and maybe that could be wondrous and they might all house their own histories and universes, but those aren’t the ones I want to understand I have never felt so small, like every tiny echo of and between has been seared into my memory and trying to self-destruct in the process of eliminating it from my mind doesn’t erase it at all. Not even close. I don’t have answers. Sometimes we make answers together or accept a temporary answer in lieu of a real one. Sometimes there just aren’t any and we are just lost, in loss, in submission to a larger unknown We want to be wrong. I want to be wrong.