Femme Seule
Vanishing Act II: Haunting away from haunt, the typology & topography of the vanished.
This is the second section of Vanishing Acts, a sequence of letters about disappearance & desire. The first section, MAIS, is available here.
Sometime in the murky pulse of my first winter in New York, a stranger asked me at a cafe: Why are you alone?
Wrested from some internal space, I looked up to find a man standing over my table. I laughed, said something like sorry? and he continued to repeat the question— sometimes punctuated a comment like Gorgeous— each time more sputteringly emphatic. Why are you alone? What are you doing sitting there alone?
I could not conjure up an answer to the question, even as it went on. After he left, I wondered whether I’d made him up: was that a manifestation of my deepest subconscious, cruel as ever and wearing a newspaper cap? So reminded of my body, the fact that it has blood, when it burned like this up against the skin of my cheeks and forehead.
As evening came in the following hour, the waitress asked me to leave. I’d been there for so long, it was getting busier, and the table was meant for three. 1
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