<I am sat at bitter distance from my companion/interlocutor. After a night of locked out bedsharing- we’re sat in the fine art library, Edinburgh.>
The library reading room is dead quiet, but for occasional eruptions from another library user. These episodes are almost close to rhythmic, no one but me is reacting. I sense him catching each moment before bolting out of the room- the stairwell provides precious little discretion as the sounds of him fill the gaping atrial space.
Our bitter distance was constructed, fizzing and sharp in opposition to my stable wooden table. (My inert table.)
I thought about writing a letter:
“I haven’t got you; I can hear you missing them, your statements are so longing laden. I can see you speak to them, wanting that difficult physical manifestation. When it happens, I will be well out of the way. In fact, I feel out of the way already.”
Yet. All is contrary to the letter. On my boundless inert table, the objects draw in close. I fear the objects and their contents, my fear springs their contents into crisp perceptual focus:
<Contortion, a complete one>
My mind flies down the conspicuous stairwell, I am erupting in it, I am falling right down it, I am running away down the Cowgate. I am shaken and slapped, I imagine my own self, a body with a bleeding head on the stone.
It’s a state so central to attention, a state so deserving of attentiveness in such direct opposition to my ectoplasmic reality that can be taken and transferred, but nonetheless always begets a hole where the other is desired to fill. The effervescent other who has once in wave-format entered my home.
I cowered from it, I screamed at it, my electromagnetic devices whirred with it, like chirping crickets, the grass and pollen they like to roll around in stung my eyes.
“I don’t want to see what’s behind there on the green. I don’t want to speak to you in this stupefied state. I see my escape drawn up so practical and perfect and I spit in its direction - I cannot advance.”
All the landlords crystallised in London told me as such. I am sat on my inert table seeing flat after flat after flat, like I said. I consistently announce that I’ve finally understood, I’ve got it! I comprehend that it’s all one flat.
I don’t.
I can’t reason my way out of it, or lighthouse books it away. I want to eat it or rub it ‘til it’s gone like soap.
I want to run, contort my enemy like I can contort Queens Park. I wrote a letter to him yesterday:
“I said I miss you over and over; I feel like the creep standing at your door in the rain, hail or sleet. We’ve known each other the whole run of the seasons... To have been warned this many times and yet still persist, that is passion, you must understand. Let’s reset time and pounce on it. I know that’s impossible. I know, because you told me.”
I kept gazing in his direction across the stone, a frog in my throat, a confession in his coat pocket. Guilt, bravado, myself like the wrong’uns in the Peer Hat. All these things weighing heavy in the rainclouds.
My most negative interior says that it’s pity or patronisation, the way he touches me; I love the way he touches me. I believed, for the first time, what he was saying about love and bodies-
2 things in allowance and nonillusion,
Beautiful, charming, intermittent.
The letter ended with 3 little lines. That is, the letter to either my enemy or my friend but not to both:
“I am sorry! I love you! Quite a lot!!!”.