Non Sequitur

The language of modern desire is so awful. “On the rebound.” Lord Byron, cover your ears.

Mick piques my interest, with his curly hair and compact body full of an itching life, keeping his cocaine trysts in the bathroom. Asking me questions about what he sees as my lack of love, grilling me, sure that I am in love despite what I say.

“I do what feels good,” I say, “but essentially I am incapable of love.”
“You want to, but cannot?”
“I do not want to. It is distasteful.”
He is sure that I feel something for The Man. “You touch him, you appear…there is really nothing there?” With a grin, patronizing, almost.
“Nothing.” We learn the postures early. How I touch him has nothing to do with how I feel about him. I think it’s strange Mick would even equate the two.

We move on to talk literature. The men crave realism, narrative, a real division between truth and fiction. They want to know, for instance, if The Woman had an orgasm or didn’t, and if not why not and if so, bully for The Man.

The lines that can be drawn twist and turn and disappear. Truth can be true even if it is not actual. What is actual to one person can easily be perceived differently by another—why do these men not see? They seem to want a reporting, a distillation of reality, objective reality, from all the liquid nuances that, stirred together, make a life.

Even after the Postmodernists obliterated the idea of objectivity, these cranks hold on to it, a life raft, perhaps, in a watery world no one has ever understood. Do they fear the chaos inside themselves? Do they feel the chaos is “feminine,” try to rationalize it, put it through a sieve extracting tiny pebbles, solid, from all the juicy, nurturing muck? Fool’s gold! The jewels they pull rudely away from their fertile, earthbound homes may shine, but emptily, having no longer any context.

Mick, the truth is: I love The Man.

Mick, the fiction is: I love The Man.

I am capable of nothing but love. I am incapable of anything like love. Love is slippery and gobbles me up from my liquid insides. Love is solid and attacks from the outside violently.
I cannot imagine listening only to one song the rest of my life, be it a dirge or a cumbia. I cannot imagine loving only one person the rest of my life. I cannot imagine eating only one food, touching only one texture, smelling only one perfume. To what could I then adapt? What choices could I then make?