letters to a friend, day 85: phantasmagoria

on grief, desire, rotting teeth & a reality that exists now only in memory & dream

I am now in the chokehold of something beyond my comprehension. What had once been concentrated, the particles of my fury, even despair, now disband and disperse, infinitely outward. I wake at 7. I brush my teeth until my gums begin to bleed, though this never mitigates a pervasive sense of perpetual decay.

I flip through books 1, 2 and 3 discursively, because you never know which might better serve you on a morning like this one - essays, poetry or philosophy? I shower and dress diligently, remembering to handle each clothing article only once. I notice I have lost weight, but I do not recall when, or how. I open the cupboard and attend to the matter of mugs as the coffee machine whirs gently to life. Sunflowers for mornings, Irises for midday, Café Terrace at Night for evenings. I talk to my friends. I think about the news. I try my best not to think of you. I brush my teeth again.

Still, something lingers. Buried in the back of the throat, or flitting across the tip of the tongue down to the roots of the teeth. I want to rip out all of my teeth and start again. But there is no starting over. I would not have a plan even if I could. There is only now.

Now is a dangerous time. How shall I illustrate this? It is the moment in which nothing tangible remains. It is not Paris on the metro enshrined in gentle caresses, nor the Eiffel Tower lawn as the sun beats down with the perfect beauty and stillness of a painting. It is not Leeds at 4.30 am, safe and warm in each others’ arms, conversing in whispers that felt simultaneously comfortably familiar and deliciously new. It is not Dijon / York as you ask me what’s for dinner and I unspool the infinite thread inside my brain. It is not the jazz bar where an electricity pulses between our bodies and I struggle to contain my laughter, bringing my lips closer to your ear as the music swells.

Nor is this moment, indeed, the riverside as the sun grows rosy and the last woman in the seating area reaches for her wine glass, only to realise it is empty, and probably time to head home. I carry the last of the glasses on a tray and explicate to a ginger boy whose face will change many times over the months to come — Newcastle and Spain and casino and restaurant and I understand but despite my awareness of the logic in the situation, nothing will stop my heart from collapsing in on itself. I carry the tray inside. I feel like that woman: reaching for the dregs, the last sweet sips of summer, only to realise the glass is empty. It appears it has been that way for a while, though I don’t remember the weight of finality punctuating any particular moment.

Now certainly is no longer the moment in which your mother drives me back to the station. She is handing me tissues and telling me your childhood stories and that I deserve better. You sat in this passenger seat once, probably, though you do not find it necessary to share any part of you (we never spoke about or agreed upon this) by the time I reach this point (your doorstep), so I will never know for sure. Yet the tangibility that exists within this moment, if only faintly, is what separates then from now. Then, I knew what you sounded like. If only on the phone. If only for ten minutes. If only to tell me — I suppose this is the last time we’ll ever speak.

I will never again, it seems, share the inner life with you; the private details of what you thought and how you felt from moment to moment (see: good Betty & bad Betty). The inner life is a kind of centrality, a weight we are anchored by, connecting us in the most vital sense, to ease the whirlwind of our lives as we exit the womb of teenage youth and enter, kicking and screaming, into our twenties. The inner life is story and joke and thought and feeling alike, shared over and over, til the braids land in place to form a rope.

It was feeling as though everything occurred within the sparkling interior of some glass orb, a dream from which I never wished to wake, but knew I must. It was knowing, because you had told me so, that there was no one you would rather spend your limited days with and we would have a grand time, a truly hedonistic summer, because I am divine, a work of art, and I pervade your every thought and I am a glass of water at 3am. This spread a joy from my heart to my lips to the tips of my fingers. Life is a hangover, you said, and I am a glass of water.

Now is rather a moment in which I can no longer tell who (you, me, fate) cut away the braids and frayed the rope at its edges. Now is a moment in which blame dissipates. Now is the falling away of tangled webs spun in fits of anxiety; now is the moment in which I am standing at the edge, in the distance, far away. I look to my true priorities, I look to what can be, I look to the back of my mouth only to see a spot of decay still lingering there. Why is it that no matter how hard I try (and don’t think I haven’t tried in so many ways, but some things I would like to keep even from you) to scrub you out, some pale imprint remains?

I feel arrested by some force exterior to myself. I sit down to dinner. I clean, I make a drink, I participate in the joy of the evening. I strip the grime from every last pore in my face. I brush my teeth until I bleed. I gather my books and determine to dive into a dreamworld carefully composed by some author, which contains no Paris, no Leeds, no jazz bar, no empty glass on the riverside and certainly not your mother. But as my brain details this exhaustive list of things I must under no circumstances think about, my eyes slide absent mindedly from the page.

A vision forms before I can string my thoughts together in any kind of linear fashion. We are in a train station and my hands tremble and I meet your eyes and I see you, wearing the face of someone I once knew. Once, I timed how long it takes for my dreams to form. I placed a stopwatch beside me. I laid my head down on the pillow, closed my eyes, and fell, as though from a cliff’s edge, into a discursive, shifting phantasmagoria. 3 minutes and 15 seconds. That was how long the stopwatch had been running when I woke. I felt a violent shudder, a slam on the brakes.

In those 3 minutes and 15 seconds, my mind experienced complete and utter freefall. Often before I fall asleep, I enter a state in which I am entirely lucid, but I find myself unable to prevent images, noises, people and concepts from wandering into my mind against my will, in a strange and brilliant slideshow. I am fully aware, yet I have no power; I am held captive by my imagination.

You are holding me and laughing softly as you meet my gaze and the great orchestra in my mind swells to a glorious climax as it settles over me like snow: the thought that you have returned, that I am home now, I am safe here in our inner life. I have myself, but I have this too. You hold close the decaying parts of me in wonder and intuitively I know that I need not fear again. There are explanations and apologies and new beginnings. These are the seeds of our inner life, our garden — from which springs poetry and song and a knowing down to the marrow of the bone. I wake with a violent shudder. A slam on the brakes.

I find it amazing, you said, that a mind as beautiful as yours is willing to dedicate even a small part of itself to me. To tell you the truth, such a part of my mind was once rather expansive; it pervaded nearly every thought and action in which I partook. Then, you were tangible. And now? What is now? I have described it as a dangerous time — this is because I do not know what this state of being signifies. Each morning when I wake and shower and dress and brush my teeth, I can scrub out longing and pain and anxiety and the ache of missing you. I feel clean. But there is one spot of decay which lingers. Now, that part of my mind, dedicated to you, is this one small spot. It is a brief window of phantasmagoria. It is the 3 minutes and 15 seconds in which I slip into a dreamscape, into an artificial inner life where no one has been hurt and no one has been left and you love me.

I told you in my last letter that I would patch myself up in my usual fashion and continue with my pursuits, nurturing my own inner life — as I did before you and as I will after you. I am happy to report that this has been the case. I am as yet unable to determine how I feel about my phantasmagoria. It preserves you in a neat, contained sort of way - and that I like. Whether you wish to be preserved, is really up to you. I once told you that even when I don’t know you, I’ll always be glad I did. You responded likewise.

Perhaps my mind (my body? my soul, even?) took these words and moulded them to make my phantasmagoria. As a gift or a curse, I do not know. This is now, this is the intangible, this is the always-just-out-of-reach. This is a state of mind beyond my comprehension or control. I relinquish it. Tonight I will make dinner. I will walk the dogs. I will sit with my brother and watch a film. I will brush my teeth, but perhaps I’ll try to be a little gentler than before. And I’ll be seeing you, in my dreams.