Notes from a Room

Don’t you have anything to say? Shall I say it for you? You’ve had plenty to say recently, haven’t you, in conversations with the people you’ve sought out, the friends you’ve had to make, the people you gratefully meet to make it sane though another evening, to escape from me, from yourself… Conversations tinged with the sense of an ending, with the sense that everything is coming to an end… Increasingly drunken conversations full of sarcasm, laughter… Conversations full of goodwill and confusion and fragile hope… Helplessness… Conversations overshadowed by the sense of a coming catastrophe, by the catastrophe that’s already happening… Stoned conversations in which you say too much, in which you go on about the End, about the necessity of the End, losing yourself in your words even as you shame yourself… Mad monologues in different voices in which you free yourself of me and the others free themselves of whomever they carry on their backs, free at last, in the end of time, the end of conversation, the end of sense… An endless confused monologue resembling the End, enacting the End as you get beyond me, beyond yourself, and everyone yawns and makes a move, goes to bed, bikes home, just as you’re getting started, just as the End is finally coming…

I made you cryptic, didn’t I? The truth is we grew into each other not like lovers or happy families do, but like tendrils and thistles. Where else could I have gone, after I fell into you like some bumbling guardian angel? You hid, and I hid with you, what choice did I have? So we both had to wait, and so our lives – our life – became a waiting game. It was as if our story had ended the moment it began, the moment we found each other on that concrete path between the thistles, like some Kaspar Hauser with his failed teacher.

Follow me, all you whom humiliation in love or neglect in friendship confines to your apartments, far from the pettiness and treachery of your fellow men. Let all the wretched, the sick, and the bored follow men—let all the lazy people of the world rise en masse;—and you, whose brain is aboil with sinister plans of reform; you, who in your boudoir are contemplating renouncing the world in order to live; gentle anchorites of an evening […] be so good as to accompany me on my voyage, we shall travel by short stages, laughing all along the way at travelers who have seen Rome and Paris.—Nothing shall stop us; and abandoning ourselves gaily to our fancy, we shall follow it wherever it wishes to take us.

— Xavier de Mastre, Voyage around My Room (via here)

When did you begin to fall? Wasn’t it when I was born in you? You still sometimes think of yourself as my fallen angel, don’t you? Wasn’t I the one who pushed you out of life as you sat in that dark train station, trying to ignore the piss of drunken Swedes, sitting in the fumes of piss, waiting to be taken back to your room in that boarding school, back to that concrete path between the green thistle bushes, back to nothing? I fell as far as you on those nights, in your anxiety: how else could I have pushed you out? But now I’ve returned, now I’m here to tell you you can only return through me. Or that we can only return through each other. I need you as you need me. We reach for each other but are we falling or rising? Or is reaching the thing?