l’appel du vide

on debilitating inertia, the black hole of the past, and the anguish of tangibility.

dizziness of freedom

i’m always sick to my stomach. i know what this feeling is now. it’s nausea. anxiety. angoisse. but im only terrified because i am free.

sartre wrote “man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” kierkegaard defined anxiety as “freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility.” he compares it to a man standing at the edge of a precipice and being struck with a sick sense of dread, because he feels both an intense fear of falling but also a strange compulsion to jump. l’appel du vide. call of the void. our existence hinges upon the decisions we make. every choice matters deeply which is why we cannot choose. we want to make all the right ones, we want to succeed because we want to be loved. but there is always the temptation to choose wrong. to self destruct before something else can destroy you. so, caught between an overwhelming fear of failure and the disturbing human urge to plunge headfirst into it, we stand paralyzed, unable to act. anything can happen, so nothing does. and, just like sartre said, i’m being haunted by this nothingness.

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corporeality

i’m having a bit of trouble lately. I feel like a stranger in my body and it scares me. it’s the same trouble i’ve had all my life- I don’t feel like a girl. but I don’t feel like a boy either. that’s the problem, I don’t think I feel very human at all. I can only think of myself in terms of feelings and metaphors. the fact that I have a concrete body that other people can see and touch is inconceivable to me. it doesn’t feel wrong to liken myself to a wildflower, or a deer grazing in the forest. but seeing a beautiful person on the street is like observing a species I am gravely unfamiliar with. and my interactions with others sometimes feel like a bad sitcom about an alien attempting to make sense of earth. belonging is carved out in small moments with close friends, or being held tightly and kissed on the forehead. but it’s fleeting. and when i’m alone I am painfully aware of the fact that the world and I are estranged.

it never got too bad. I never starved myself. only ever locked myself in the bathroom and carved ribbons in my skin. tried to make my outsides match my insides. I don’t like the way I look, because it’s not me. your body is supposed to feel like a home but I never could settle in mine. some days it’s like there’s too much of me to contain. but all anyone can see is a sliver of a girl. the same theme has weaved itself throughout the narrative of my whole life; it’s the ever-present feeling of being trapped. I want to crawl out of the middle of me and finally see what else is out there, finally see past myself. i’m too big for the small town of my body.

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hole theory

summer was a sun-sick haze. it was meteor showers and lovemaking and blue moons and a thousand little beautiful things that I won’t remember because I was too damn happy in the moment to commit the details to memory. it was a love-induced delirium. the capital L kind that never breaks your heart, just makes it ache like hell. maybe because there’s a string that ties us together, like when rochester tells jane eyre “i have a strange feeling with regard to you. as if i had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.” I can always feel the pull of you, and it hurts. but I think that’s just how these things go.

anne carson wrote, “if we follow the trajectory [of desire] we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. who is the subject of most love poems? not the beloved. it is that hole.” the absence of a loved one is also their proof. the outline they leave when they go away is evidence of their shape, and what it continues to mean. what a beautiful thing, to be missing from someone. what a marvel, that the heart possesses the ability to see what is thousands of miles away, to feel what cannot be touched.

anyway, autumn now, and all my friends are moving on. everyone’s leaving New York. i’m the last of the old guard. the city’s become unrecognizable. it’s streets are peopled with strangers i will never know, and i cant find a familiar face in the crowd. i’ve been thinking lately about how change is always a loss. even if it’s a good change, even if with it you gain double what you ever had. it still leaves a hole. a void. i just can’t stop grieving.

{going back to sartre for a moment: hell is not other people. it’s the gaping wound of the past, and the dull knife of the future.}

everything has an undercurrent of sadness to it in autumn. I still laugh often, I feel overwhelmed by joy, i’m lulled to sleep by contentment. but outside the leaves are changing. and they’re being quiet about it but I know what goes on. where did august go? we must’ve misplaced it. this can’t be all I get. I want more of you.

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inter-corporeality

im trying to see the body less as an object of importance but merely as lines that separate us. i’ve always thought of sex that way. less about la petite mort and more about the human ache to be as close as possible, to get under someone else’s skin. everything we do comes back to this. science would have you believe its about neurochemicals and reproduction but what you really want is to interweave your nerves with someone else’s. you want to feel someone’s slick, wet, beating heart thump against your own. any sadness you experience derives from this lack. lust is not about the shape of bodies or the sticky pleasure at the end; its about trying to warm yourself with someone else’s mouth.

nothing feels colder than explaining life’s magic away with biology. people call that logic but it’s nothing but an aversion to mystery. i think it’s arrogant to believe there’s an answer to every question the universe poses, and that you, of all people, have them. I guess i can’t seem to care about anything that isn’t driven by emotion. if there’s no thrum of feeling beneath whatever it is you’re saying I don’t want to hear it. it’s lost on me. i’ve been told i’m an emotional whirlpool, and maybe it’s true. i’m often at odds with myself. always two conflicting currents running through my center. it’s why I can’t relax. I guess i’m only attracted by force. I’m drawn in by intensity and repelled by levity. I don’t like safe distances or being told to slow down. someone asks me if I believe in god, and I think to myself that I don’t believe in anything, except this space between us, and that there’s got to be some way to fill it.