Homesick

Furtively she looked across at the stranger. He was striking a match: for an instant his beard was lit up, and one eye. And even this trivial act seemed remarkable; she felt the solidity of it, felt how naturally one thing linked with the next and was merely there, insensate and calm and yet like a simple and tremendous power, stone interlocked with stone. She reflected that he was certainly quite an ordinary person. And at that she had again a faint, elusive, intangible sense of her own existence; she felt herself floating in the dark before him, dissolved and tattered, like pale, frothing foam, and felt an odd stimulus in answering him agreeably. And even while speaking she watched herself and what she was doing, helpless, unmoved in spirit, and yet with an enjoyment that was divided between pleasure and torment, which made her feel as though she were crouching in the innermost depths of some great and ever expanding exhaustion.

-Robert Musil, "The Perfecting of a Love"

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I'm not quite feeling suicidal anymore this morning, but still strange. Meeting Narc on Friday night really shook me up. It feels like it was a desperate homecoming, long awaited on my part, but when I got to his place, "home" was no longer there.

I used to love "Hyde and Narc" and forgive him every slight, every insult, every abuse, because we were together in our depravity. I used to say "blackouts" are God's gift to the alcoholic. (I now, realize, by the way, how sick that was.) But I really believed that...

Narc is a "macro" person in his relation to the universe and I am a "micro" person. He pans out and feels disconnected, above and separate from it all, an alien watching people, watching love pass him by. I bore in on things and become obsessed, extrapolate infinities of fabricated meanings from mundane relationships, convince myself of love in an amicable conversation. I can live an entire life in one word uttered by his lips. (Then Hammer met him and said "huh? He's just a guy with a red beard!")

But we were tied together in a way, and I "bore in" on him. I honestly always felt with him no matter the abuse. I was with him and that's all that I cared about. I felt high with him-- heightened, tense, aware, elevated, nervous, purposeful, dutiful, filled with spiritual love and enveloped in "drama." I wanted that back. I wanted that connection back. I wanted that high back. I've been four months without it and all I wanted was for that world to come back. Narc and I in a little bubble, existing outside of time and space. Time doesn't matter in his apartment. You can wake up at 5:00 PM if you want, you can stay in the house for days and then go out on a 2 day bender. You don't have to return phone calls or keep appointments. It's sex, booze, takeout, TV and videogames around the clock. I wanted back in to that bubble. (When I was feeling self-indulgent, I'd think of us as Paul Newman and Piper Laurie in "The Hustler.")

And then he opened the door on Friday night and I knew that it wasn't there anymore. Narc was depressed and awkward and in a bubble of his own. I was depressed and awkward and in a bubble of my own. Those bubbles would not merge. That's what hurt so much about being there. And even intimacy didn't help. Even in swallowing him, I couldn't metaphysically ingest him. I used to be able to "ingest" him from just a look! It hurt to be there.

I'm angry at him right now. I'm angry at him because he ruined things. He ruined things for PopStar, who was clearly just using him from the start. He ruined things and then peeked up from the ruin, invited me down there, and double-checked to see if he had really done the job right.

And I can do nothing about it.

But I feel cast out from my home. I feel cast out from the spiritual home I had made for myself. I feel divided from myself, leveled, full of self-loathing. And what am I left with?

Reality.

God-damned reality.

I've never been a fan of reality, but here it is in all it's awful detail. There are things to do... papers to grade, phone calls to be made. The heat makes me aware of my physical self in a way that I've always tried to annihilate.

I can't tolerate being present like this with no recourse. And that's when suicide seems logical. I won't kill myself. But there's the needling thought and I hate it. I feel so ungrateful when I think it. I don't want to kill myself. I just don't know how to do this.

I just don't know how to do this.

But today I'm going to go check on Hammer's birds and then meet Anxious at the museum and for dinner. It is what it is what it is.

love,
h


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PS: In October of 2004 I wrote a poem... something to do with whiskey and "Kirchner" boots. Part of it went something like this--

Seven years of a speech in a circle,
The bruises lifted from my mind
To my face.

Sobriety: They are off my face and back in my brain.