a week after we saw each other i went to the nude baths at the korean spa and thought about tereza’s dream about the parade of naked women circling the pool. how she considered love and beauty sacred, because she needed meaning to survive, and how tomas’s lack of commitment, his need for meaninglessness, flew in the face of this, rendered love ordinary. how this rendered her ordinary too.
i watched as old women washed their hair, dutifully dried themselves with small towels, milled about making sounds. when i rose from the bath i held my shoulders back, grasping at dignity, but i was ashamed.
like tereza, i feared i was just another animal loafing mindlessly toward my basest bodily desires. i feared this spiritual thing i felt about you and around you was nothing but chemicals with a narrative papered over it. chemicals you could just as easily interpret differently. like, you told me you wished you could believe in god, and i told you it was a decision you could still make. but you didn’t want to make it.
how do i go on investing meaning in any deep feeling i have from this point on if one of the deepest things i’ve ever felt was based on nothing, turned out to be all in my head? how can i believe in god, beauty, love? i’m just making it all up, compulsively. many of the realest things i’ve ever felt were about things that never happened.
i hate everything i write about this and it makes me hate everything i’ve ever written before this. melodrama is a sacrilege, it betrays the writer’s tendency to privilege their own feelings over reality, dignity, divinity. if i turn this into a story, i will be taking this live, transformative, humbling thing and turning it into a static object, just another thing that happened to me that i will turn over and over in my mind, alone.
if my overabundance of feeling is what keeps us apart, then it is base and shameful. i don’t want to find ways to glorify the parts of myself that ultimately keep me alone. i don’t want to be an artist, or a vessel, or intuitive, or sensitive, or romantic, or idealistic. i don’t want to care about art, beauty, or love. i just want to be with you.
going to get drunk, going to write more, going to eat less, going to walk all over the city, going to show you, going to hate every second of it because this is the stuff of my life, this is the real stuff and it all feels fake while the fake stuff continues to feel real, like the only stuff that matters.
This is so beautiful , I hope you never stop loving