narcissus

the project continues.

today i wrote this, then i sent it to my fictional lover.

The tragedy reaches a higher level when Narcissus, at the moment when his tears disturb the pool, realizes not only that the loved image is his own, but furthermore that it can disappear.
(Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, 104)

At that small half-oval kitchen table in Paris, my tears were part of a realisation that this image was about to disappear. In realising that the object of my love was an image that I had created, I knew that it would soon be destroyed. I would soon be dragged away from that site of reflection. That is, the place by the river where I intersect with Paris and with JB. That is, a place of love.

Ripples, like words of an email where he says we cannot meet again. My image shatters. In the days leading to this moment I’d been increasingly drawn to the water’s edge, to the image, to the love I was fostering. Unlike Narcissus I knew that the image was my own creation and therefore believed I could not fall. Armoured with knowledge, I thought myself invincible. I continued to look at the image, to revisit that place, to conjure feelings that I knew were fictions. Yet no armour shielded my eyes which continued to drink from the water.

And then this day, at that table, the water ripples and the image is lost and the loss surges within me to bring forth tears. My tears offer another layer of disruption because they conceal not only the image, but the absence of the image. But still, this double erasure leaves me mourning a loss that is greater than an image, for it is a loss of self.

These tears might also be armour, for they blurred my vision and created bodily convulsions that distracted me from the focal point of my loss. In this moment my attention shifted from an external love object to an internal chasm. While I could not see the absence I could certainly feel it. My loss was not physical, because the absence of his body and mine had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the loss of a reflection (of my self) that I had come to love. At this moment I stopped, I faltered, I cried. I did not see my tears, nor did I feel their hot and cold on my skin, because at this moment I had no external presence or surface. With closed eyes, sobs erupt from within. Convulsions, sounds, tears, but none of this happens through physical consciousness.

The intensity of the loss was superseded by the intensity of these bodily eruptions. I was aware of the chair beneath me, the music around me, and the light from the window, but I had no awareness of my external presence in that room. A mess of emotion and bodily tissue, I was uncontained and spilling outward. Most present were the internal passages through which my sorrow pulsed, raged, and erupted in tears and gasps for air. When suffocating, there is only internal struggle. I forget his lips and his hands. My need for air (that is, for life) rises and seizes me. I mourn a loss at the same time that I clutch at life. I am feeling something that engraves itself into my soul and will be written there forever. This is not a ‘something’ that I can easily give words to, because it’s nothing that is familiar to me. And it is not locatable, because it puts itself everywhere, in and around me. It’s a feeling. It’s a moment and a spasm that I will never again feel in its entirety. It was here, but now it’s over there.

From here to there is a journey I cannot trace for I’m too busy living, breathing, and writing myself into the next chapter. I lift myself from the chair, I dry myself off, and I walk into another room. I am met with a silence that is beautiful; made tranquil through the absence of bodily spasm. This is not unlike a post-orgasm transformation. In fucking, my body has a saturating presence where I am all skin and touched surfaces. This physicality reaches its peak at orgasm and then falls away, like water sucked back into the ocean. I am left with quiet bliss. My body melts into the bed and absorbs everything; the pleasures receding into some internal cavern. I lie still as the sediment settles, deeper and deeper into a place I cannot fathom. I no longer have a body. Or rather, it was over there, but now it’s here.

I sleep so that I can forget. I fuck so that I can forget. I fall in love again and again so I can etch over these old words with something new; like waves that continuously renew the shoreline. I fall because I have to. I forget most of what I know about reflections and fantasies. Forgetting is necessary so that one day I can return to the river to reflect.