Category Archives: Writing

X feels shown up, he tells me, as if his whole life has been declared invalid. As if he’s being shown everything he’s done is wrong. They’ve seen through me, he says, they’ve seen through my façade and they know I’m a fraud. I’m not even close to the real thing, he says, whatever that is. And everybody knows, he says, even myself. Boohoo, he says. He needs a do-over, he says, a mulligan. What makes him feel this way? he asks me. Is it himself? Is it me? Maybe, he says, or maybe it’s God, or the Devil, or the Unknowable. Maybe someone’s cursed him, he says, cursed him with fraudulence. What’s he not living up to? Can I find a girl for him? he asks. They’re probably right, he says, he probably just needs to get laid. But I’m the worst one to ask, he says.

He’s ruined it, X tells me, he’s ruined everything. He’s ruined his life. But he can’t even ruin his life right, the way he imagines a ruined life, with grace and poise. It’s his feelings, he says, they’re all over the place. How can he repress his feelings? he asks. How can he learn from the English? he asks.

He’s disappointed me somehow, hasn’t he? X asks me. Then why am I so silent? he asks. It’s time to blow the lid off this silence of mine, he tells me. I’m full of shit, he says. Come off it, he says, you’re no better than me. At least I’m honest. Why are you so silent, was it something I said? He thinks he understands, he says, he’d do the same, it’s no wonder, but he wants to hear me say it. Say it, he says.

X doesn’t think he’d mind prison too much, he tells me, at least not solitary confinement. His room is like a prison as it is, he says, this room he carries about inside him. He’s already in prison, he says, all he does is sit here. Sometimes he walks around, feeds himself, evacuates. It sounds melodramatic, he shrugs, like everything I say, but hey, I didn’t choose it. He doesn’t think he’d mind isolation much, he says, the walls wouldn’t make much difference and the seasons mean nothing to him. The interrogators wouldn’t know what to do with him, with their stupid games, he says. They’d just think I was arrogant and try to break me down, he says. Whoever heard of such a creature! he says. An abomination, he says, that’s what he is.

X tells me he becomes more of a problem to himself every day. He shouldn’t think so much, he says, especially about himself. Isn’t that what they’d say? he asks. He’ll lead himself into perdition, like his own demonic double, taking his own hand. Perdition, what a thought! he says. But it makes sense, he says, we can only lead ourselves into perdition, we have to be willing to be led by ourselves. Maybe they’re right, he says, maybe he shouldn’t think about himself so much. Maybe he should get a dog, maybe that would help.

X feels like the end or beginning of something, he tells me, he’s not sure what. He just wishes it would either end or get on with it, he says, he’s had it with being bounced back and forth like this. It makes him feel wrong, he says, out of step. That’s why I’m so hesitant all the time, he says, and so embarrassed. I’m embarrassed about living like this, in this series of endless endings and false starts. Amateurish, he says, as if no one had ever lived before.

It’s this feeling of not knowing anything, X tells me, that’s what makes him afraid. Is it so much to ask, he says, I’m not exactly trying to build the Tower of Babel. He’d like to really understand something for once, he says. Nothing ambitious, just to grasp his own little corner of the world without confusion. Then he could put it to use, or hold a hand of peace over it, or trace its origins and effects, and from there move on to investigate other things, build up whole fields of knowledge! You see how I get ahead of myself, he says, that’s what makes me afraid. Because it turns on me, he says, the Unknowable, it corners me. If I could turn it around the way it turns me around and be done with it… turn my back on it… or learn to accept, like the mystics, learn to know what I don’t know, what a joy that would be… but no, X says, there are no mystics anymore, and besides, he’s too grasping, too childish, too exposed… exposed to what? he asks, what’s he talking about?… his worst fear, he says, to be known by what he can’t know… he feels disarmed, deciphered without being able to decipher, that’s the problem, he says… it’s cornered him, he says, cornered him like an animal! Maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.

His feelings, says X, can he trust them? Of course not! he shouts. There he goes again, he says, the minute he starts talking there’s no stopping them, they tear at him, tear him with them. Maybe these repressed English folk have a point, he says. Then again, he asks, what do they gain by nipping themselves in the bud? Do they really save themselves from their own feelings? X tells me he wants to be saved from his own feelings. How would he go about repressing them? he asks.

X can never reach out and fix on an opinion again, he tells me. No more truths, he says. He’s been picked apart from the inside by truths as if by a virus and his trust is gone, especially his trust in himself, he says. He’s horrified by himself, by his infinite capacity to prove himself wrong. He’s in one of those moods, he tells me, making quote fingers. Maybe he just needs to get laid, he says.