On the Dissolution of an Imagined Intimacy
Fragments
The abstract.
Intimacy is drowning.
Love is rarely if ever requited.
Violence is the space between two irreconcilable perspectives.
The woman.
The first thing to know about her is that she used to answer phones for the Samaritans, until someone called up and presented a case so convincing for suicide that she could not reasonably contradict it. After this event, she felt that she could not continue the work without feeling fundamentally dishonest. Now she works in a supermarket, and feels lonely.
The man.
The first thing to know about him is this anecdote, from early in their acquaintance:
He sees what he is sure are her bag and coat, the latter draped over a chair, reserving a space. He sits down nearby and begins to read, but his heart is hardly in it. He glances periodically to his right, to the bag and the coat, her remnants and the promise of her return. This proceeds for a time, maybe half an hour, in which, overwhelmed with a jealous longing for those items, he reads maybe one hundred words.
Eventually he glances over and sees someone approaching the table she has reserved, but it is not her. It is a man, young, attractive enough to make the jealousy rear up in him, become greater. Has this man come to fetch her things for her, to free her to leave? If so, why does she not come herself? Does she realise he is here waiting for her, and therefore send one of her men in her place? Her men — the phrase conjures images, for him, of courtly love, courtly service, knights in service of a lady. Absurd.
All this passes through his head before the man, the stranger, sits down and rummages through the bag for a book, which he places on the table and begins to read. It is his bag, his coat. The stranger glances over in time to catch the transition from smouldering jealousy to bemused self-reproach in the face still staring his way. It must make very little sense to him.
The woman.
Her sexual history is informative if not eventful. Several men and a couple of women.
The men were largely meaningless, not because of any innate qualities but because of the economics of the thing, the means of acquisition. Long depressing hours on dating sites, a plain woman without major deformity is never a hopeless case on these sites, she did not lack for male attention, there are so many men on these things who first court their ideal woman but later after enough silent rejection become indiscriminate. But the quality of the attention was not of the kind she wanted — slow, awkward, born of desperation not unlike her own and not productive of any great passion. She felt always as if she was only being settled for, not desired, and knew that this was true of her own feelings for them. The sex, if it got that far, was listless, dutiful. To say they had done it. These things ended, before or after the sex, when she or he realised the thing was nothing more than a hopeless flailing in search of intimacy that was not to be found here — a pessimist, she thought: not to be found anywhere for people such as us. Among the men were what she judged, guiltily, to be truly hopeless cases, the kind which kept her own complaints in check, it could be worse.
The unremarkable passages of these relationships aside, the women were not much better, or were differently bad. These were only two, but worth describing in greater depth than the men. One for whom she was an awkward experiment, and who was, in fairness, equally an experiment for her, both of them having little experience with, but enduring interest in, women. They met online, tried it out, felt at first strange to be seen together in public on the dates — though a stranger would not know it was a date from looking, there was little enough physicality, and besides would likely not object in this day and age — lacking experience, knew little about what they were doing in the bedroom, suffering periods of confusion and unhappy boredom. This lasted some time before coming, unmourned, to the same ignoble end as the other failures.
The other was experienced with women, passionate, interested, the best sex of her life, yet ultimately disappointed in her, in a perceived (correctly perceived) lack of real commitment to the relationship. She was restless, though it was the best time of her life, restless because uncertain, uncertain because inexperienced, or yet unsatisfied with experience. She was used to settling and being settled for, and could not shake this feeling even when it was irrelevant, destructive. This, the present moment, was perhaps good, but was it only good by comparison with what came before? Slim pickings. Rotten fruit. And finally, restlessness, a messy breakup. Perhaps the only person who had felt any real passion for her, now the only person to really, bitterly, and justly hate her. From a distance. She sent her things back through a third party.
She is disappointed by the adventure of sexuality, unwilling to embark upon it again.
The man.
His history is meagre, a testament to the quiet despair of being undesirable and little else. He has never fallen in love with someone without them having resented him for it. People close to him emphatically insist that he is to be loved, but nobody is willing to do the work of loving him. With every new infatuation, he manages to convince himself that it has all been leading to this, that she is the one. He builds up a cruel, false, perfect image, and then falls victim to its slow crumbling.
The woman.
This is to say that from her perspective, his attachment is surprising and increasingly worrying. They met through mutual friends, became acquainted, and without her noticing or wanting to notice, he became infatuated. Which is to say, she did not. When it came time to confront these messy feelings, she told him no, but now she is coming to believe the rejection did not really sink in, that whatever words she used at the time — she has since forgotten, though she thought the sense was quite clear — are now being twisted around in his skull, examined for loopholes.
He becomes more, not less, possessive. He ‘understands her decision’ but treats it as provisional, subject to change, which, after all, she never explicitly stated it shouldn’t be. Alarmed, she becomes more distant, less responsive in person and in writing, seems, ultimately, to care a little less. Not that she does any of this consciously; it is a defence mechanism as much as anything.
The man.
He’s just got done crying on the phone thirty seconds earlier when she texts back. The usual routine, wave after wave crashing in upon him until he can’t hold them off any longer, the barrier crumbles and there’s no-one to call but the same person he always calls. His confidant we can call M., but M. could just as easily not be there. M. listens patiently and provides helpless platitudes. M. is his Samaritan. It is only important to have some safety valve so he doesn’t pour these feelings into her inbox. To M., he says as much as he can bear to say. Even here he doesn’t name her, names the loneliness, the jealousy, but not its absent object. M. must get the picture. Head throbbing and throat dry as he runs out of tears, he has only just put the phone down, feeling empty but cleansed, when it buzzes again and it is her.
Now, to understand how ridiculous this makes him feel, you have to realise that she is entirely what he was crying over. He is hopelessly in love again, scouring the situation for any possible hint that it is different this time, and finding everything implies the opposite. He senses that she finds him unsettling, repulsive, in his new obsessiveness if not inherently. The whole fiasco of calling up M., though he never mentioned her name, was occasioned by her absence. He has been alone a week, the days bleeding into the nights, malaise creeping into the bones. There are other people he could have seen, has made abortive efforts to see, has felt disappointed when these efforts fell through — but he is aware that anything but her would be a placebo. The phone, unfamiliar with the concept of bathos, buzzes and lights up with her message.
The message says, hey what’s up? yes we should catch up, how about tomorrow? Its casualness, you understand, is a slap in the face. No I’m sorry for taking so long, nor an it’s been terrible this last week. The brutal comic timing, and the feeling that on the other end of the line the entire weight of the thing has been lost, give rise to a bitter sensation in his throat. Thank God, he thinks. And fuck you.
He is also forgetting her face, though there are people he sees less often whose features he remembers better — faces engraved into his memory the owners of which he hasn’t encountered in months or years. It is that immutable law by which the most important thing is always the most distressingly intangible. The most just-barely-out-of-reach, if that quality permits of a superlative. It’s the same law that means he can’t ever get a straight answer, can’t send a message without immediately regretting the phrasing or the wait for a reply he has let himself in for.
She is very far off. Everything happens in the absences.
The woman.
She has been in a hole recently, feeling not the violent self-loathing to which he is vulnerable, but a sort of diminishing sloth. Yet sometimes she wakes manic, springs from bed, the weeds in the overgrown garden seeming suddenly to invite action rather than preclude it, and she decides to do everything she had been putting off at once.
Thus, turning a corner on the way home, with a shopping bag in one hand and her phone in the other, she replies to his text. She is ready to ease back into social life, she does not think about it too much, expects the reply to be as slow coming as her own. Instead, a long reply comes in five minutes, teeming with emotional subtext she can’t quite read; it is a missive that tries achingly to say as much as it can get away with, without scaring her off. She feels somewhere between bemused and guilty. At any rate, the mania is still there, she is still pretty determined to get her shit together, and she ends her next reply with
let’s meet asap and catch up
The man.
He is already bracing himself to feel angry when her unexpected attention undercuts him. The cruel picture of her he has built up in his head shifts back into its heavenly double and leaves him feeling stupid.
The woman.
There it is, the sinking feeling of starting a conversation with someone with whom you will never be talking at anything but cross-purposes. Anyone would have said they were just friends talking, but there is an air of discomfort about the scene. It’s no better in person than by text; he cannot say anything outright, only chip away at it, such that she is caught between ignoring or addressing it with every reply. She can feel all that constructive energy fading, does not know exactly how to tell a person that they are a drain on one’s energy, how to break up with someone with whom you are ostensibly just friends.
It turns out to be unnecessary.
The man.
Once he has put his foot down he immediately feels ridiculous. ‘No, it is not okay!’ So what? Is this an ultimatum? On what grounds? You can’t force someone to want to be around you, or cry when circumstances conspire against you. Yet every time this has happened he has said, ‘Of course, that’s okay, I understand completely.’ He has always confined himself to rehearsing resentments in the shower. Spitting them in her face feels like taking to the streets with a placard in protest of some great injustice. He needed some outlet for what he has always repressed; this tantrum is it.
So be it: go the whole way.
The two.
Witnesses present in the small café at the time of the confrontation report that it went something like this:
‘Bitch!’
‘What?’
‘I’m sick of this, I’m sick of you treating me like a dog.’
‘Like a dog? What did — ’
‘I’m not finished. I pour my heart out to you and you just — ’
‘No, I’m not finished. What the fuck do you think this is? I’m not your girlfriend.’
He deflates.
‘I know, it’s just…’
‘Or your mother.’
‘I know, but can you just…’
‘Can I just what?’
‘Just help me.’
‘You’re aware that you called me a bitch less than a minute ago?’
‘Please.’
A brief silence.
‘How am I supposed to help you, anyway?’
‘I need you.’
‘You need a therapist.’
Here he bangs on the table and shouts, ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I’m not doing anything. Whatever you think I owe you — ’
‘I don’t think — ’
‘Is in your fucking head. Now I’m leaving. I’ve got enough problems of my own, I can’t handle yours too.’
‘Wait.’
Reports confirm that she did not wait.
The woman.
They meet again later that month, after he has sent enough messages begging for the right to apologise, and also, she tells herself, because if she does not give back the book she borrowed from him some time ago it will anchor her to him, give him a way back in.
So she listens to his apologies neutrally; there is not much riding on them. She even verbally accepts them, implies that after time apart they will resume friendship. She says it all automatically, knowing that the acquaintance is over, though he is evidently still in denial. She slides the book over to his side of the table and stares into the dregs of her coffee.
The man.
Though he does not speak, he’s confident she can tell he is looking at her and that she finds this upsetting in itself.
The woman.
During a subsequent depression she takes to writing a journal. She writes:
Other people have been lonely, but it feels all the same like they had no right to it. Like they were infringing. Like they had their reasons for their brief stay in Solitude — a new city, or a break with the past, or work: trivialities — but you, you have no special reason to stay here. What you have is a permanent residency. You have paid Solitude in advance, you have got in on the ground floor of Solitude, you have
She realises this is melodramatic in exactly the way he always was, and crosses it out.
The man.
After what he thought of as the breakup, despite knowing logically that the relationship had only ever existed as projection on his part, after he stopped waiting for her to call back, stopped believing those vague promises of reconciliation and started resenting them instead — after all this, he told himself that he had finally banished her ghostly presence from his life.
But now she begins to appear everywhere. Suddenly whole territories of affect are closed off to him, those she inhabited, those that now unmistakably bear her intoxicating mark. Something amusing, innocuous, a certain way she used to have of dancing, a certain facial expression — those elements of her with which he was previously most infatuated. If he notices himself, in unguarded moments, imitating these movements subconsciously, he pauses, winces, sits, and a sort of seething regret seeps into the scene, colouring everything, and when it comes he cannot answer the question what’s wrong? for the life of him.
The woman.
She writes and then crosses out, The German word for the sheer prohibitive terror which permanently prevents you reopening those old, embarrassing personal correspondences, in anticipation of the peculiar admixture of nostalgia and shame they would ignite.
The man.
She appears uninvited in dreams, a joyful time spent with an anonymous friend becomes suddenly a reunion with her as he wakes, the vague face of this potential connection shifts subtly, becomes hers again, and he becomes aware that he has fallen once more into the trap. In waking hours he imagines her reaching out to make amends, he imagines her excuses for cutting him off — that he was a toxic presence needing to be cut out; that it was an exceptionally difficult time; that he simply slipped her mind — he imagines rejecting these ingratiations in the harshest possible terms, forgetting everything about himself that makes them reasonable and inevitable, wincing only slightly at his own capacity for spite. But mainly he fears the force of her return, its capacity to overwhelm these fantasies as it always did before, its making of him a pushover, a simpering grateful victim, his tendency towards relapse.
He fears that she will never return.
He fears that she will return and it will all happen again.
The woman.
She writes and then crosses out, It is easy to get too tangled up in people.
The man.
Swipe right if u r normal physically, mentally, and emotionally 😊
The woman.
It’s been a year since they met for the last time, and she has pretty much forgotten him. Life is the same, but she is trying to make it different. She binned the journal yesterday; she is looking for less monotonous work; she is off the antidepressants again, for now; and now she is ‘putting herself out there’.
This is theoretically the easy part, a plain woman without major deformity is never a hopeless case in a bar like this. But something is holding her back, a nagging doubt, a warning against emotional danger. It is easy to get too tangled up in people. She is getting some attention tonight, but whenever things look to be moving in a certain direction with any one man or woman, she yields to instinct and politely excuses herself. Now she is sat on a bar-stool, nursing a drink, trying to figure out what this is, longing for her journal and for sleep.
Someone is approaching; without looking, without knowing the figure’s gender or appearance, she can sense intent in the approach. For a moment she becomes woozily angry at a sort of formless abstraction of all her past relationships, which ends up resembling him, and she imagines throwing her drink in his face, yelling something, even she does not know what. It is easy to get too tangled up in people. She is drunk.
She quietly repels the advancing figure with a gesture.
The man.
Somewhere in a different time zone, it is midday. He is travelling alone, something to make him feel less numb. He is on a boat trip with a bunch of tourists, the sun is beating down, and he has over-exerted himself.
When he gets seasick Julie (who pronounces her name ‘Yulie’) tells him the trick is to focus on the shore, a single reference point amid the churning waves. She was sick earlier and knows. He tries to follow her advice but it’s no use. The horizon’s smooth rocks hold little appeal as visual anchor in the rolling sea. Unconsciously, as he attempts to focus, he finds his gaze coming to rest instead, implacably, on Julie — her eyes turning to match his, and her lips curling a subtle smile which could mean something or nothing.
