I’ve always thought that our love will end with a monumental, overly dramatic gesture. How could it be otherwise, we couldn’t possibly let her wane in some syntactic ambiguity. A giant, concrete, inky black full stop to terminate our nonviable storytelling experiments. Burning the yarn after many years of trying to tie that Lacanian knot in the hope that we may become one at least in the realm of auto-fiction.
And then the vast expanse of white. The unwritten, the unnarratable, the unweavable. #FFFFFF
But we cannot simply efface her, right, close the book, pretend to be some better version of ourselves, and move on. We already chopped off so much from our souls in an effort to affix them in our grand delusion that this is what we desire. We invented her, no, our love, through language, thus doomed her from the very beginning. She had to be this imaginary third who could carry our impossibility to have a kid together, or just anything real whatsoever, as our body liquids poured out and dried after every attempts to vest them in each’s Other.
Look, we don’t have another choice but to kill her. For we fabricated her, against everyone’s skepticism. First, the c o m m u n i c a t i o n b r e a k d o w n. Apart from English, you don’t speak any other language except for some academic French wow how educated of you, and I speak five languages, only four of them don’t make any sense to you (quick throwback to all these dinners with your friends where I was your “artist” as an excuse for my unpolished thoughts and phrases). And then the age difference people saw, and the age difference people never saw, since I spent so many hours seated among your students, barely a decade older than them, glancing at their hypnotized faces, feeding on their adoring gaze, wondering how come they don’t notice the child in front of them. This eternal adult who wasn’t allowed to be a child, except for when the two of us were alone. Making me feel like a grown-up, like a protagonist, for the first time ever. Signs, signs, signs. We took everything for a sign and threw it onto our giant assemblage of sentimental junk.
The more we were perceived as incompatible, the more we conceptualized this as some authorial kink, like mad performers hurling metaphors and signifiers at the invisible audience—quiet, most certainly due to the overwhelming effect of our oeuvre. Remember all the frantic trips we undertook whenever our schedules allowed it. Pretending our love is a baby, so we carried her everywhere with us, wishing for a tabula rasa happening of sorts, like these animation series where characters undergo all types of violent mutilation only to return in the exact same shape and at the exact same level of silliness in the next episode, otherwise there wouldn’t be a show. We are no animation characters, however, more like logograms in some unpublished lettristic draft. And our love is no baby, she has been part of a very consensual threesome; we fucked her in every way conceivable, then cried about it. Let’s admit it, all our sex has been grief sex, and the two of us—athletes of our own impotence to be:::
Nevertheless, the most daring of our fantasy was probably the idea that we could grow old together, yet how do you grow old without a plot line? Without it, you get stuck in the eons of decomposition. Same rituals, time and time again, without initiation or closure. When I was finally able to budget therapy hours in my exhibition grant, I tried to create a new you for every session. But our love stayed immutable, despite my objections, curses, tears, punches in the couch, singing folk songs from my grandmother’s homeland while rolling on the carpet, next to the high heels of my perplexed yet intrigued therapist. I’ve known this morbid curiosity ever since I left my country. Constantly trying to translate myself for this cold stare, to wrap myself in the shabby worldview of those who’ve never lived outside of their comfort zone, outside of their scenario. How do you love in another tongue? My therapist had no response. She only speaks English and some academic French. She couldn’t help much, but the rage that filled me sustained me for so many projects. Money well spent, all things considered.
You told me once that my usage of punctuation is like a bisexual who just moved to the big city. Still, I hold dear every non-letter, every miniature constellation of dots that belongs not to a specific language or culture but to all of us, equally. I spent my childhood so devoted to calligraphy, without realizing that one day I’d have to abandon this alphabet, these words, like a bulky bag that slips off your shoulder while running to the bomb shelter. Only the memory of them remained with me, in a part of my mind where you’ve never entered. To me, truth is in the special symbols, in their typographic grace that could shield us from the endless horrors of logos. Self-governed, surrounded by white silence, an oasis where everything and anything is possible. These symbols bring me great comfort. Doodling them, contemplating on them, drawing them on both sides of the page, then holding the page against the light, admiring how both sides intertwine. My last sketchbook would be like ->
|_O\/3 O\/3R \/33R Я/-\DIC/-\|_ ⊬$<>a≡%∴∄
The result of month and months of hesitation whether to accept that fellowship on the other side of the globe and
- how to tell you
- how you would reply
- what our love would be like
- can we spin it into epistolarity
- will its prose sustain us
But that would mean even more language, even more hermeneutics, even more anthropological waste. We have to put an end to this discursive suffering. I realized that even if I go deaf / numb / blind, the memory of my hand on your hand on my sculptures, of your breath against my neck, of your smell when we wake up together will be stored in my senses in a mode no vocabulary or code can articulate. Plus my mixed feelings interbreeding with your mixed feelings, the en-suite void. There’s no technique to express this, and poetry is merely one way to admit such failure.
This is no ransom note. It’s just over. Our hip-and-cozy-happy-go-lucky-Sunday-at-the-museum-Lebanese-takeaway-with-Portuguese-wine-erudite-yet-somehow-unhinged-oh-so-arcane anglophone love is no more, and we simply have to get rid of the body, or taxidermize her and place her among your books idk whatever works best. I’m packing light for the other side of the globe. These are my final words in English for you while I get ready to learn my sixth language. You can come too, however, in another language, in another personage. I’ve had my share of shapeshifting, and it seems like there’s more to come. Shall we metamorphose together?
☉
O\/3R
RW is a mid-career identity entrepreneur with background in loveandlossization and special interest in genre travesty; in search for work-art balance.
minor literature[s] 