What if I imagine myself into Bruce to construct the presence of the absence, theorize the emptiness I feel has settled in my life like a person who never leaves the bar? Do I need to do that to move on from here where I sit still on a stool in the husk of his life? Or do I imagine myself into me so I can figure out why I chose him? Why him? Maybe I do neither of these. Sometimes I just want to leave, to move to another place, a city, a countryside somewhere else where I don’t speak the language. This is an old psychic escape for me. Sell everything, move to Mongolia, live in a yurt amongst people who raise Yaks. Sell everything, move to a northern town, work in a small general store where the door slams to release the tension in its long spring when the people leave. Lose everything in a fire, be forced to start over with nothing but yourself and the insurance money. What does your aesthetic look like if you start over? What do you reproduce? What do you end up with if you follow every new impulse? What does it look like? How do we know where we end and where influence begins? I think about all of the intentional purging and sorting that would be avoided by catastrophic loss and I secretly wish to try it as a thought experiment. But I don’t commit to it. I would not burn my life down even if sometimes I fantasize a firesale.
I watch streaming dramas on the computer to fill the emptiness and I feel accompanied by the people in the stories. I like them or dislike them, think about them as I’m falling asleep and feel a kind of shame as a result. I wonder if my shame could be mitigated by writing about them like this. Would my half-life be less shameful if I wrote about it? Somehow I think it would because then I would be making something, producing a narrative instead of only consuming others’ narratives. My theory is that I would discover myself in the writing about what I notice. Just as I would discover myself in the things I would collect in the wake of total loss. I write that and I think it’s true but I also want to reject the idea that we are an assemblage of what we can buy, that our identities are wrought of our purchases. When I lived in Bali, I had so little and most of what I had belonged to someone else. I had no art on the walls. I had no stylish furniture. There were no family heirlooms, no books I had read in the past. There was only me and what I was curious about, Julian, Luh, the warmth of the kitchen, the contours of the garden I planted that broke local rules about keeping the wild outside the walls of the yard, segregating the raw from the cooked. I loved that garden. When I left people came to request cuttings of the plants I had collected and I gave away my waterlilies with their pots.
Tiny Events 