#phantom ex

A terrible + gripping fear to write, to do anything beyond the bare minimum of survival + living. Even to read. I start + stop or fail to start at all. Surrounded with piles of books. My eyes casting themselves at the waiting words I'm unable to care for. Instead, waiting, always for the next crisis in a world which seems a series of such things.

I cry a little, at random, looking at the trees moving with the wind in the gray expanse outside the window. This fragile universe, my own frail body within it. The agent of everything I am too small to control. A time, once more, where I am caught between the past + the future without the energy for the present. Functioning as a spectre, floating room to room to do this or do that as I think of my friends both dead + alive.

The week has been nothing. I wake. I do my minor tasks, closing loops + opening others. I think + feel too much. + then I try to do either thing a little less as if that was ever the answer.

In the evening one night, I phone my partner who informs me I need to process what has happened. I do not process anything.

It is almost too crude. Or it is too crude. The trauma + my treatment of it. My shirt + jacket still on as my body is acted upon by another. I wrote the details down. This attempt, in my mind, to expel the shame others may take on when the same happens to them, but then I doubt it + myself.

I consider if, through the reckoning, I only make a theatre of pain to be consumed in the same way I was consumed. I call it a lesser event, because, in my experience, it is. + I almost want to laugh at that, the same way I cackled on the street as he told me he wasn't going to walk me to the station after. My mouth moving before my mind as I said, "I wouldn't expect you to."

It all narrows anyway. The left side of my mother's heart weakening + me all these miles away until July unless I'm needed sooner. + I want to roar at that as well, this helplessness, inhabiting my friend's own words; his life to be narrowed in aftermaths, or perhaps it was just a kindness to spare me the uglier reality of my meaning having been some elaborate construction, a hallucination of a closeness, of friendship. I do not think I am beyond such possibilities. I do not think I am immune to the disease of a single hand gilding an absence. But I do pin myself down, like butterfly wings under a microscope, to interrogate the illusions of hope.

There's a room somewhere in my memory where you pluck your hair from my stomach like a monkey grooming another monkey. There's a room in my memory where it all meant exactly what it meant without that meaning needing to dismantle the structures of our lives to exist. The thing I wanted. The thing I never did.

How I did not wish to colonize you, + yet to be a tourist, transient + replaceable, was equally regrettable. + maybe I am too foolish, too romantic in my beliefs around the enduring quality of philia. Amor platonicus. How we could make it whatever it must be. Or the thoughts of Levinas. The self through the other. The other through the self. Or Buber's I + Thou. I + thou. + the respect for the agency in what removes itself from me. So it doesn't matter in the end, does it -- the truth inside our farewells. So farewell. Farewell. Farewell. Farewell.

I was in a rather more poetic mood yesterday, having read some Charles Wright, + the paragraphs I wrote were leagues better + yet too much to imagine finishing now. I think another day. I always think another day. + yet all around me is dying + always has been + I am reduced to waiting.

One day, I wanted to write the history of death that is like a dark path lit with the lanterns of those long gone others. But, in this very hour, I lack the largeness of imagination necessary. I am all plain language. The lives I've saved, + the lives I failed to tear from the void before it took over. The void that breathes in + exhales the human soul as the body goes still. How this teaches one a contradiction of their own power, leaving me, after all the years of grief, as equally as delusional as I am disillusioned.

Feeling myself getting sleepy, I shake my head as if I were a wet dog. It helps very little. All these theories slipping into fragments to fit together another time. Recently, I've been exchanging letters with a moral psychologist on the ethics of ostracization + who we imagine ourselves to be when we assess the rightness + wrongness of any one act.

The day before the assault, the ex-lover tracked me down. Love. Love. The grand romantic love. A changed man or claims of such. The apology. The beauty. The temptation of a better story than the one we'd written. + yet the lover scatters his luck elsewhere, leaving rusty relics for the past, for the woman whose skin he'd dressed me in, who he'd punished me for ever resembling in any shallow manner. Of course she can be so large + mythic with those years of distance between them. + of course, he flattens me into a caricature of jealousy, unwilling or incapable to understand the wound pattern. Her face transposing itself over my own again. + yet I am only full of sorrow for it.

That instinctual explicable tendency to sabotage the field before he's barely taken one step fully upon it, littering the landscape with contempt + suspicion -- a secret patch of scorched grass unto himself as he fantasizes about wildflowers sprouting up from the ash I taste as it lands violent + acrid on my tongue. Himself who pre-authors tragedy, where we must love within a sweeping hall of distorted mirrors. + I know the psychology of such an eros too well to deceive myself.

But oh how I wish to deceive myself. All his short-lived pink-tintedness. The way I am destroyed so thoroughly with its every vanishing. The desire to be loved + seen + the scene in which I am, what, the understudy to his true wanting. Positioning his face in the light of her anticipated regret + improbable return, preened + noble as the lover who understood + could never let go of her whole herness. That I must suffer for her + because of her again + again in my disappointing humanity compared to the trick of recollection.

In more straightforward terms, the avoidant's phantom ex which possesses the present + excuses them of ever fully participating in the demands + risks of a current love. Some devotional taxidermy one can kneel before in the name of depth to evade the living body in front of them. How I will always be at a disadvantage against a ghost that requires nothing as I require something more like the horror show of a relentless courage while his hidden longing habituates itself in corners of the internet for her to find. Even my feelings, raw + gentle in their response, are narrated as uncouth + unmanageable.

It isn't for me however. To change. To do anything about. So little ever is in this parade of being as two lonely days now draw themselves to a close. + I wishing for something. A peace. A pause.