Dear F: From the Beginning

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death… Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”

– Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“She stood still, slightly darker than the darkness, and their hands met as if guided by some perfected instinct which found no place in their conscious minds.”

– Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandrian Quartet, Justine

Dear F,

I’ve tried so hard to think of my favorite moment, favorite thing that you’ve done, favorite scene we’ve acted out together, but there are are many. Too many one liners to start or finish your story, our story. Maybe that’s all you were really, a one liner – all I permitted myself to be at the time, all I could bear to be. I wanted to be a period at the end of a sentence and collapse into myself and let that be it. And you let me. Oh how you let me. But then I began to expand, without my knowing it, and that was the beginning of the end of us. Of you, of the you that’s only ever existed through my eyes, the you I conceived to be my sentence, the you I composed so beautifully in place of myself.

I’ve tried so hard to think or know if you knew it or know it now. Sometimes I know you do, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I convince myself that I felt it, that you felt it. Sometimes I think you must of.

Now I don’t care anymore. I don’t care anymore because I know now that even if all my projections onto our scenes were mutual, even if it meant something to you, that meaning wouldn’t mean anything to you. And while I agree with your emotional nihilism in theory – that’s no way to live a life.

For all my mistakes, I know at least that I have always fought to live my life in opposition to Hegel’s sub-man, a being who wishes to eliminate the anxiety they feel when confronted by their freedom and therefore denies the world and themselves. A being whom Beauvoir writes is, “afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of possibilities.” This unforeseen future which he fears, “may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.” A nihilistic being who anyone whom has ever wrestled with themselves and the void alone can see straight through – through to the “disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself.”

In any case – fear, agony, and nihilism aside – I, in the face of such indecision when confronted with the overwhelm of catch phrases and iconic vignettes we created together, will just have to start at the beginning.

From the beginning: a Tuesday night at the end of October on the wet cobblestone steps before Sainte-Catherine de Bruxelles. There where I waved to you as you approached and could only see my dark silhouette in my uniformed black trench and boots. From the beginning, when the greying stubble on your cheeks scraped mine as you gifted me your Italian ‘il bacetto’ greeting.

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Solitude Came First: A Female Steppenwolf

Neck

“Solitude is independence. It has been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve… From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh.”

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Solitude always comes first. For most it’s the few moments spent brushing their teeth and washing their face in the morning, or alone in the car and up in the elevator to the office, or walking the grocery store isles on the way home – maybe even later eating dinner in front of a screen. But for some, like me and some other scattered Steppenwolfs, solitude is where we first matured and where we go to become ourselves. Like him, all I’ve ever wished for with each passing year is more solitude and independence. Not long ago now, my wish was granted and I found it as cold and vast as he describes. Yet it quickly became the kind of cold that suffocates you, and I found that its dark stillness isn’t the dark one thinks of in contrast to light, it was the darkness of the absence of light, where no contrast exists at all.

Solitude came first, and then the hot raw steam of flesh, where everything became permitted like a manic but somehow soothing and controlled free jazz improvisation.

Here will live my shamelessly unfiltered stories of the unabashed deep penetration I’ve experienced of my body and self – all that the darkness squeezed out – told in amateur stream of consciousness style and interwoven with bits and pieces of all my friends who wait to greet me in my solitude in the form of books, films, art, and music.

Tales of my delicately sordid life, dispatched from my solitude. I think on the topic of each Steppenwolf would have agreed with Bob Dylan in saying, “you must pick one or the other though neither of them are to be what they claim.”

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