Thursday, March 20, 2014

In Absentia of the Absent Other

The door closes, unassuming.

It’s not until the door shuts that I can feel the emptiness now enveloping the room, and five in the morning seems far too early to feel so empty. I hate this feeling. I hate travelling, if only for this exact moment in which I find myself quickly shorn from the company of others and realize how utterly dependent I am on the Other to make me feel like I haven’t had a melon-baller taken to my chest.

This is just a faceless hotel room without him here anymore.

I’m alone in this city again, and I fucking hate it. I can’t fucking stand it. All of the ghosts come out to play the second I’m left to my own devices in it and it’s been four fucking years and yet that doesn’t even begin to matter. All that matters is that this is a long-inhabited haunt that doesn’t seem like it’ll be abandoned anytime soon. I want this memory to throw itself onto the calling sharp swords and I’m just so fucking sick of this simpering singularity that won’t even look me in the eyes.

The memory of those eyes is sufficiently problematic without the real thing in front of me, I realize.

I grew up in absentia of the absent other, and maybe that has something to do with the feeling I have garrotting my gut — one of those childhood memories shrieking to the surface of the present, (whatever that even means) and rendering my larynx weak and effete.

This, and the memories that inexorably come with the return to such a city — such a city in the early hours of the morning, the hours past sundown — bring me to the brink of such solipsism and I’m just so scared that this is another facade and I’m one degree divorced from relapsing.