December 14, 2014
The quiet is deafening. Starting today, I lose contact with the one I love. I usually use the phone app “Line” to stay in touch with her, but she is in a location where she doesn’t either have a cell phone or access to the Internet. All quiet on the Western Front. All quiet in the house. To make the room more lively, I have been playing music by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. The way he looks and sounds is so far removed from my world, that playing this album, is like a foreign presence in my life. I eventually lose track of my reality, and enter into his world. My favorite recording by him is “Cocktails for Two, ” which was originally a romantic song, but in his possession it becomes a mockery of romance and love. Yet, when I hear the lyrics: “Most any afternoon at five/ We’ll be so glad we’re both alive / Then maybe fortune will complete her plan/ That all began / With cocktails for two” - I find myself in misery, because around that time it is cocktail time, and there is only a reservation for a table for one.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” I obtain a faint memory of a life that I feel rather nostalgic now, thinking of it. The ritual of getting up in the morning, and here I worked on the living room table, and she comes out of the bedroom into my arms, for a good morning. We open the window shutters to let the sunshine bath us with its rays, but since she’s gone, either by design or fortune, there is nothing but clouds.
I shop, I look, I pretend to do stuff, but I’m not here or there. I look at my cell phone as it sits on the desk attached to a cord to a wall-socket. I keep it there in fear that I will lose power or battery the moment she calls - but alas, I know this is only a fantasy on my part. “Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?” Who knows? I taste my loneliness as if it was the most expensive bottle of wine. I savor the memory as I let the taste roam around my tongue. She made me a bag to keep all my loose ends - I am sort of like a woman who needs her bag more than anything else in life. But since she’s gone, I don’t feel compelled to bring the few objects I need when I leave our house. I feel empty, so I want to become empty-handed as well.
“I delight in what I fear.” It’s the only thing, that keeps me fully alive. The separation could be visualized as a vanishing point. I look in the distance, thinking I may see her. But what I see are the things by the side of my vision. It’s a tunnel that I want to run into - but I know I’ll never reach the other side. But yes, one can still imagine that there is a destination in that tunnel, where eventually I’ll reach the one I love.
“Her head falls asleep in my hands / Where are we / Together inseparable / Alive alive / He alive she alive / and my head rolls through her dreams.” - Paul Éluard
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