the unbearable lightness of seeing

some musings on tepid male sexuality, and becoming

she asked me, on perhaps our third date: “do you think everyone in this room can tell how in love we are?”

this is a eulogy for a dark and sweet nectar which smells distinctly purple and i promise if you just tried it you would leave the ambrosia for the gods because they don’t give a fuck about us, here, just the two of us. the cup is empty now, of course, but it stays on my nightstand as a fragrant what-if. this is just another mpdg-in-the-wild docuseries.

in some sense, i was only there to provide contrast. she had rented out this ridiculous dress, an angry and sputtering pink, with enormous frilly lapels which flapped in the breeze. and these stupid doughnut earrings which jarred intensely with the rest of the outfit. but it was jazz, on some level, and she owned the night. there is an odd pride at being attached at the arm with a beautiful woman. you own some of the eyeballs too, just by association.

i felt very lucky the whole time it lasted. that was the wrong thing to feel. gratitude is an absence. people love to escape themselves, and absences are dank, porous things that the lover seeps into. soon there is no other to love, and you just become their mirror. then they escape you.

I think she asked me that question there, in that dress that she didn’t own, because it tasted good and tasted like rebellion. this wasn’t a room we were supposed to be in: we (well, i) had paid to be there, but it was a more profound transgression. this was a place for weary couples, a night away from the kids, a night to relive the burning totality of the early days. and we were there, flaunting ours, flaunting youth, and dirty shoes, and crazy dresses, and red-faced doe-love. and in that most exquisite moment, i was everything she had wanted from this relationship, for i had ceased to exist. there was only the idea — playing house one icarus-length from the resentment of these grey parental substitutes. she loved this shit. she never paid for train tickets and stole chocolate coated almonds from overpriced coffee shops.

and she was everything i wanted, because she could have been anyone. the gratitude had already eaten me. i think she knew this from the beginning, but seeing past each other so deeply was a badge of honour. her vision were clearer than mine. this was an experience machine, a person maker. i suppose people end up twenty-seven, fashionably weary, and the march of those in-between-years is greased with the blood and tears of failed romances.

seeing things like this hurts. it pushes my fragility buttons. because I think every single one of these people is endgame. because i always am so, fucking, grateful to the women who date me, and it’s easy to weave that into sweet nothings. so i’m “there”, i’m “attentive”, i’m “perfect”, and soon enough, i’m a bit too perfect. and it’s such perfect cruelty, in those twilight days, to suffocate her with your lack of wrongdoing. if you play your cards right, and are good in all the speakable places, then you steal her words. and if you steal her words, you steal her air.

i have come to realise, having parted my lips from the nectar-cup, that there is great violence in seeing. unleashing great visions of how noble and righteous you will be in relationships onto the world, without first addressing the murk in the mundanities of your existence, is a dangerous act. it is an oppression of false pretences.

you have to be a person first: flawlessness is a state of pure potentiality, of unshaped clay. i was so paralysed with a fear of being the wrong thing — a fuckboy, an asshole, a “nice guy”, a creep — that i became nothing; an absence.

no one can fall in love with a mirror. people love to escape themselves.