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the saddest blog that ever was
6.02.2007:
Every kindness deserves to be returned
Non-fiction / fiction
She loved him most in the broad twin blades that in its smooth undulating strength felt as if it could power a plane, as if only recently great giant Icarus-ian wings were shorn off and what was left in the streamlined sinews was merely the shadow of flight. She loved him thoroughly – in every conceivable possible human relationship from every angle. She loved him sexually, platonically, fraternally, maternally, paternally, childishly, professionally, pedagogically. She would have loved him if he had not been her lover, would have loved him as a friend, a father, a brother, a mother, a colleague, a child, a student and a teacher. There were so many different ways to love him she lost count of her many selves loving his many various parts. Every kindness he deserved, and returned with the most genuine sincerity as if his life came out of this principle of simple reciprocity. But her own love came this way: awkwardly and in long breathy sentences fluffed with extravagant imagery and metaphors. She was aghast.
So she always had to write in the third person, detach herself somehow from too strong a voice issuing from within. As if this was how non-fiction was turned into fiction. As if this self-detachment was not the most mundane tactical maneuver in a generation with its own stylistic handbook, where irony was so sharply defined as to be neuroses, becoming the very force driving this ‘generation’ itself, onward and upward towards ever more frenzied and dizzying heights of self-referential lambast that was ultimately, of course, a hidden sort of bombast. As if she were a Lydia Davis; as if there was any demographic that would even recognize the reference except for the very English professors grading this very reference, on its meretricious incorporation of the famed Proustian translator into the whole. As if she didn’t go to Berkeley, as if her education was not the most thorough sort. Oh but how, oh how.
How every story she would ever write would proceed like this: interior monologues narrated from the past, weighted down with memory and so incapable of present action. Why time could not forgive her, and would not move on. She thought that happiness dried the tongue as well as the eyes. But really, it was only that happiness was no longer a blunt instrument of her unraveling. She wished she could say this to him, mouth it with her lips even, eschewing her voice, flexing her vocal cords but producing only a hollow sound – an emptiness that was there but gone, comes and goes, an echo.
Blog // 1:56 AM
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