Arithmetic progression

November '25 (part one)

I resist writing because no words feel appropriate. I chew them repeatedly in my mind; they are pulp that cannot readily be transcribed. No rhetoric, just image sequence then—as little metaphor as possible. [X] and I (occurring in time) sat outside, downstairs from the analysts’ offices. He arrived breathless, frenetic, very much himself but at a nervous pitch—swinging side-to-side, shouting nonsense in my face about hating Halloween, how upon starting they already determined they’d have to switch him to another, “heavy artillery,” the questions they’d asked him, what drugs did you say your father sold? and what drug is your brother addicted to? (“poetic justice,” he said, the same phrase I used in session not twenty minutes prior), did he do drugs? which ones? (he listed them, wagging his finger in the air in his way), was he ever suicidal? (who isn’t?)—and it was perfect to stand there stunned and anonymous and receive him, statue vessel I. He bought my bagel which I left untouched, and we sat outside at a table leaning forward and backward and gesticulating with the wind flapping our hair. O [X]. The jaw working, the wild look cast aside, the striated teeth, the reddish giggle and squint and squiggly vein coming out at his temple, the eyes burning absurd blue.

We discussed—no, it doesn’t matter. Except for my strange sensation the previous day walking through the park, I already somehow knew it. Possibility is—unthinkable, how much it swells—I’d like to think he told me right as the wind seized a paper bag from under a light weight and tossed it up and away, out of reach, not worth chasing. Or as the toe of [X]’s shoe tapped against an intruding sparrow. He texted me later about debts—still, does he feel like he owes me something? How did I ever manage to make him feel that way? That pain and fortitude in him, his own sense he’ll never be understood, the plowing ahead anyway—I’d forgotten it. Had I ever really conceived of feeling sympathetic—or fine, call it compassionate—towards him? Totalizing submission. Force greater than I, kneeling at it, prepared to—I think of nothing else, these pictures only sustenance, not wearing off except as a need to grasp again this always-fleeing always-ending thing, doomed to impermanence—that drug—I am on a new plane, different but in a familiar way, nothing in years has every felt that way, but I remembered it; it is imprinted.

==

I’m alone with it in the (reducing) chamber of desire. I float in fetters. This is the only way I’d want to be nullified. I’m perfectly calm in its thrall—the gaze I held still and open as [X] applied falsies, my stiff blank body as the needle drilled ink over my ribcage. [X] wonders if I would faint, as he did, on that curved velvet Chesterfield couch, watching naked women dig hooks into their breasts, draw blood. I pointed out the pleasure of a syncope, almost sexy, yes. Pink-lit, gothic room, we chainsmoked in a permanent resident of the Chelsea Hotel’s home, took lines off of a delicate mirror, a girl showed up with a real albino snake coiled over her shoulders. I feel as if I could have written my own life, just made it up. [X] I received, his hands nearly crushing me—in the morning we spoke of metonymy, fallacy, the separating of the brain from the self he finds erroneous—but how easily I separate my body’s pleasures from this other—need—which is—bound to be unfulfilled? The wall coming down and rematerializing: Lacan’s orgasm.

A face that, having always been misrecognized, is impossible to recognize.

This is negation.

There is no ledger.  

==

There is a relationship between waiting—purgatory—“dead time”—and anxiety. I did not fall asleep last night, and never actually thought I would but at some point dreamed of [X], the prewar, his family—the instigating coincidence instead being his sharing my job at the agency, coming in during all the hours I’m not there, for months unknown to me. Yes he is my inversion, or vice-versa, verso, he fills in the gaps, completes it. Once more “work” in his presence feels like sacrilege. I wish he didn’t seem to think I still care about that stuff. I’m only writing now to pass time, distract from the excruciating last few hours without knowing what’s to come. Just like his face, the dreamed-ness of the apartment will turn back into the real somehow. How vividly I can see everything and have always seen everything, toured it in my mind last night. I couldn’t even remember the arrangements at the farmhouse like that. Fucking. Showering. Sleeping. Eating there. Being cornered by the whole thing. I’m afraid now that I’ll have a seizure before I reach him. My body takes its cues from the mind, just smoking and sparking like a busted machine. Right now it’s no help with the question of whether I’ll survive this.

==

Scripted irony, nearly, of this situation—a certain logic it creates, then clears it bouncily—"I ran into him at my therapist’s office and now we fuck in between our sessions” —does it undo our understanding of progress, or does it too support an excavation of the past? I watched him through the kitchen pass, a little theater he acted in for me, grabbing pans hanging from high up. It’s hard not to feel as if all losses have led to this, are simply a parting way for this to happen. Although this will part too, and how swiftly I don’t know, and I’ll be left with nothing but this again. How many pages will it continue across, here, transcribed in the now? “And the years shall run like rabbits,” I hear the thunderous limbs, see the motion-blur and feel the wake that ruffles our hair, causes us to squint. His figure in a coat, in round glasses, flopping blond, down the end of the railroad. Yes, seeing him as if through a tunnel, or a telescope.

I perch on his chair, spin. Light comes in gauzy through his curtains. Yes, I dreamed of this very room, months ago, in June, before I thought I’d ever see him again. The poem he hands me to read from the student paper gives me deja-vu but so does everything, he asks me what else, he reads my mind, I jab two fingers at the burning blue eye, the mouth that parts, frothing. He lies all over the bed, shirt riding up, runs around the room and hands me things, frantic. Piles up books in my lap, he says, like a pet proffering slain birds. Crane’s GREEN-eye; I pull it off the shelf. Then after coming close over my shoulder a few times he invites me into his bed, and I burst into laughter at his clumsy word: “cuddle.” I grip his arm and it surprises me how thick his white down has become, how thick his body is now, comparatively. I turn and move aside the pillow to look at him. Sure enough. His mouth feels, tastes, just the same—the only thing that was ever right and that I ever really loved. “I forgot how small you are.” We both remember, although the past has not come to terms and I’m not sure it will—instead coded in physical contact, gestures, stray words. We laugh. Exuberance? Irony? We keep touching each other to what—be sure? Go walking down Third bodies angled in, bumping shoulders, heads ducked to conspire—he kisses my cheek right there on 86th, like five years never happened (and yet it has, it has).

==

The still life on the door, rapid marks in blue, orange, red pastel, paper cut into an oval shape—was it mine? Or was I there when it was drawn? Cannot recognize a thing I have made. His thumb in my mouth: “what are you squealing for?” I asked him. Nestling my face in his hand, nudging, animal. The familiar fiddling and fidgeting with another’s body as if it were your own. We peel, hold open each other’s eyes, pluck back the eyelids to grasp inside.

Met [X] at [X’s] last night in a haze of utter deprivation (sleep and otherwise): blue-eyed, Geminic, bespectacled, butt-chined, accomplished—essentially the ideal, who started a circle of telephone with two French strangers who bummed my last cigarettes. “Libertarian cops and Italian chodes,” I believe was his phrase, whispered in my ear. But I’m blind to it, my vision swims with the past and its recent presence. Calm in a warm halo of this yesterday but the fear returned at night, it wrests me out and lays on top of me—imagine it was only the once and will never continue. Would I still be happy? Would I wait? Would I kill myself? The stakes here are what put me in this state—my sanity, my life, this coincidence which has changed me. [X] is all I want. I am recalling, or rather reliving, the difficulty of communicating such things to him because I fear it breaks the spell. The English language, so useless, so impossible, he’d said lying odalisque and cliched on the bed in that position so close to what I photographed on my own bed so long ago. The total fixation on bodies: every divot, fold, splotch. Is that the language? Mode? Embodiment? Will it continue? Gifts I bring him: a small metal spice container filled to the brim with Zubrowka and my copy of The Master Letters, read to tatters. You smell good, you smell good, it is marine, burying his face in my neck. 

==

In the vortex of the penultimate month: his presence wears off, I become “myself” again. Long across the reservoir. Mind going dark. Abstract thing he becomes. The dove perches on the opposite roof, at distance, gazes down at me, cocking its head. It is backlit by harsh-glowing, fast-moving clouds, to stare at it hurts but I stare anyway, and when I return to the mirror there are inverted neon splotches of nothing. Blindness in my vision, I stare into my own compromised eyes, difficult to distinguish their green and struck expression. 

Men hound me. [X] squeezes my thigh, asks, like [X], for me to take him back to my twin bed, I refuse; he buys me a bundle of purple irises at the bodega and we walk through the completely empty streets of Soho in high wind. I don’t really know how we ended up there. I have very little faith in the [X] situation, this being the problem up against my faithful love for him, my certainty that I want nothing else but him.

How much had time made of him a stranger?

==

The rain takes the remaining leaves off the trees, pulls them to the ground in long piles. Cold chamomile in the dark green teapot. The haze of sleep aid. Didn’t see any purpose in getting up or planning anything so instead I pass the empty hours with nonsense: wash my sheets, clean the mirror, in the drift of Chet Baker and frankincense. Haven’t felt such real lassitude in ages. I already brace myself for the next interval like this: although I’m calmer now, the sense of “meaning” can only accumulate in one thing, it falls to the bottom like weighty sediment in the aimless river of days. Told [X] it was over in Tompkins, the blue dusk and gold foliage and lights coming on, treacly wail of electric guitar. Exercise your self-respect, will you? I am with blueprint, the origin of my desire and can do nothing but try and grasp it before it slips away. I’m grateful to feel this, would rather feel this, ultimately, than not, no matter how it ends. Ink blue. Terror rises with abstraction, absence. [X] calls with the croak of tears. How implausible any love jammed into any relationship is, especially when turned treacherously domestic. [X] scratching my knee, grasping me, grabbing my tights. I can’t bear it. We ate goat and skipped Harlem for [X’s], where I told him the truth on the back patio. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. What freedom I felt, ecstatic, when he turned and walked away down the block last night. No comparison, ever. I am done betraying. Slammed my finger in the door and was present for a second.

==

Eleven-eleven, a sudden cold snap and it’s supposed to snow at eleven. “You seem to me a pea-coat-wearing sort of person,” he’d said, the chill already coming on down Lexington. His outfit slipshod and different: still doesn’t have a lot of his clothes. When he mentioned having the same boots as me I almost told him about the matching fur coat dream but didn’t. Body-doubling, mirroring, you and I the same—he’s in on it—and the oh yes, we’ve been here before. Although we speak mostly of our recent, separated pasts. Yesterday morning I had half a mind to quit while I’m ahead—why glut for punishment or go out of my way, why beg—when he finally sent his little sign of life, I decided to go to the Met instead and see the Man Ray show. Catherine Barometer (for her moods), “arithmetic progression,” a woman’s body no different from “a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar forst of fern!” Oh yes alienation of the familiar I know that alright. Saw him later—the inevitable—sprawled out over the couch after I declared myself haggard in the convex mirror. We pretend he’s my analyst, with my head in his lap, he strokes my hair and says, “you just want to be taken care of.” But we agree that’s not the analyst’s job, is it? He says it’s as simple as writing, digging, and that’s just it. I could kiss him only for that. I can’t claim to suffer if the self just a month ago would froth at the mouth with envy or anticipation—to be touched or looked at by him again, to touch him or look at him again. He’s trying something, although I’m not sure to what end or whether it’s for my sake—self-improvement kick in my face, pale blue agenda cracked open, the urge to work in my presence, perform productivity, although I’m half-believing it and feel proud of him. Had we become more like the other we once knew. I don’t have grandiose hopes but am at least wise enough to see through one act: ocean-scented aftershave. I don’t know why we have to do all of this, this idiotic dance again, but I oblige.