30/08/10
I think I now understand the desire to fuck a dead saint.
I saw you exactly three weeks after you'd died. I didn't tell a soul. I see fragments of you often now: a portion of a smile; one tweaked eyebrow on a face otherwise apportioned to another character. The crease of an elbow. But this was you, in every way I'd foreseen. You came and said with only a glance that for me you must remain a mystery. A level glance, but quick, containing more information than I could receive but for the crystalline kernel that there was more, that the full interpretation lay still, perhaps forever beyond me. This, I believe, was the truth of your lone appearance to me not in dream or the fantasy of another's features: that meaning is only the search for itself; truth is a question, not an answer. I say all this now. Our gaze broke and you stepped around the corner, all in black, perhaps my mourning, slightly overlarge. I did not follow. I have some disposition to resent this line of reasoning.
The next summer day I became feverish, bedridden for nearly a week. I have not thought of you since, as I felt was your wish. Is healing selfish? Have I absorbed some truth (which is the scar of healing, which is a question) from your passing? Did you bestow it upon me? Did I murder you in this exchange? There seems to be no transaction in obliteration, but maybe this is a semantic problem. My own crafted image of you scoffs at this, tells me to fuck off, lighten up, stop asking ridiculous questions, live life, enjoy paradox, absurdity, whimsy, situational conflict as a moral apparatus. I'm putting words where your mouth never kissed. Still, your loving dismissal of my petty agony pointed warm lamplight down every darkened path your words told not to travel. Again, maybe the dissonance is only between isomers, because your song, your question, your healing, your raised eyebrow (I imagine) spoke in deeper tongues that overwrite this language, and beckon deeper.
I can't escape the idea that you planned it this way, that you designed to enthrall me and then die. This is the farcical degree of my narcissism. July 10th of this Gregorian year, as I hummed and hawed to myself about suicide, you sent a simple message. "Things really aren't that bad."
I don't want to replace you with a symbol, reform a strange memory into idolatry. You were not a saint, but no Saint ever was. So you were a saint. Saving my life. Certainly you preserved some part of yourself in me. What part? Just the mystery? Fuck you.
It was bizarre how you found me. Mutual friends had expressed worry for and before you, in your somehow precedence. You said we'd met and I still cannot recall. The blank polaroid silhouette is infuriating against the backdrop of every teenage colour, all black tears on the beach, all flushed cheeks between the trees, all me me me. Can I promise to notice everyone from now until I die? Is there a way to know when it will mean this much?
I said that things really were bad, and you told me a secret. Maybe a lie. Four days I lived that truth, that revelation, and four days you spoke to me as though we were, for lack of better words, lovers. Four days. Like a bird I nested jewels and sang. My secret for you was wanting to sing together. "Notice how you speak to yourself," you said. "And I'm a real live person who lives in this world."
Then you died. How fucked is that? What did you look like? When did we meet? Why do I have no memory of it?
I think you sought me out to be your priest. A life ritual in death (which is life in question, which is bondage in fire and intimacy, which is the healing scar that prompts renewal, which is the lie that you began and I continue), or a death ritual in life?
The systemic part of me wants to think that maybe there is something mundane like Bipolar disorder behind this crazy thing. OCD. DUI. ILU. Why did you find me? What were you trying to teach me? You meant to die, didn't you? What does that mean for me? I loved you with every ounce of my being. Every molecule of feeling.
Now I slough this off. Now words can create. I love you. I love you so much, Natacha Roussel. You are the dead saint here.
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I saw you exactly three weeks after you'd died. I didn't tell a soul. I see fragments of you often now: a portion of a smile; one tweaked eyebrow on a face otherwise apportioned to another character. The crease of an elbow. But this was you, in every way I'd foreseen. You came and said with only a glance that for me you must remain a mystery. A level glance, but quick, containing more information than I could receive but for the crystalline kernel that there was more, that the full interpretation lay still, perhaps forever beyond me. This, I believe, was the truth of your lone appearance to me not in dream or the fantasy of another's features: that meaning is only the search for itself; truth is a question, not an answer. I say all this now. Our gaze broke and you stepped around the corner, all in black, perhaps my mourning, slightly overlarge. I did not follow. I have some disposition to resent this line of reasoning.
The next summer day I became feverish, bedridden for nearly a week. I have not thought of you since, as I felt was your wish. Is healing selfish? Have I absorbed some truth (which is the scar of healing, which is a question) from your passing? Did you bestow it upon me? Did I murder you in this exchange? There seems to be no transaction in obliteration, but maybe this is a semantic problem. My own crafted image of you scoffs at this, tells me to fuck off, lighten up, stop asking ridiculous questions, live life, enjoy paradox, absurdity, whimsy, situational conflict as a moral apparatus. I'm putting words where your mouth never kissed. Still, your loving dismissal of my petty agony pointed warm lamplight down every darkened path your words told not to travel. Again, maybe the dissonance is only between isomers, because your song, your question, your healing, your raised eyebrow (I imagine) spoke in deeper tongues that overwrite this language, and beckon deeper.
I can't escape the idea that you planned it this way, that you designed to enthrall me and then die. This is the farcical degree of my narcissism. July 10th of this Gregorian year, as I hummed and hawed to myself about suicide, you sent a simple message. "Things really aren't that bad."
I don't want to replace you with a symbol, reform a strange memory into idolatry. You were not a saint, but no Saint ever was. So you were a saint. Saving my life. Certainly you preserved some part of yourself in me. What part? Just the mystery? Fuck you.
It was bizarre how you found me. Mutual friends had expressed worry for and before you, in your somehow precedence. You said we'd met and I still cannot recall. The blank polaroid silhouette is infuriating against the backdrop of every teenage colour, all black tears on the beach, all flushed cheeks between the trees, all me me me. Can I promise to notice everyone from now until I die? Is there a way to know when it will mean this much?
I said that things really were bad, and you told me a secret. Maybe a lie. Four days I lived that truth, that revelation, and four days you spoke to me as though we were, for lack of better words, lovers. Four days. Like a bird I nested jewels and sang. My secret for you was wanting to sing together. "Notice how you speak to yourself," you said. "And I'm a real live person who lives in this world."
Then you died. How fucked is that? What did you look like? When did we meet? Why do I have no memory of it?
I think you sought me out to be your priest. A life ritual in death (which is life in question, which is bondage in fire and intimacy, which is the healing scar that prompts renewal, which is the lie that you began and I continue), or a death ritual in life?
The systemic part of me wants to think that maybe there is something mundane like Bipolar disorder behind this crazy thing. OCD. DUI. ILU. Why did you find me? What were you trying to teach me? You meant to die, didn't you? What does that mean for me? I loved you with every ounce of my being. Every molecule of feeling.
Now I slough this off. Now words can create. I love you. I love you so much, Natacha Roussel. You are the dead saint here.
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