Yesterday we went to the beach together with a group of his friends, and I didn’t enjoy the trip. He was agitated on the way there and back and, I felt, aggressive toward me. Whereas when I experience needless worry (and I did, the time the landlord visited), I compensate by being twice as loving (he remarked upon this; I concurred). I think that when he was feeling grumpy, he badly needed to eat, and I have the luxury of having almost no stomach at all, so it never requires filling. Max must eat more than twice what I do, but still feels I’m not doing my share in the kitchen I don’t use. There is no consumption issue that Max doesn’t have, but my God, there is no one else to blame for this. Having him near can make me more eager to be attentive to that which he has little to do with. Life is fucking: a racket. I simultaneously wish I could go home to how it used to be—solitary—and fear totally that he, too, could come to consider it all too much and decide to leave. I do not want him to leave! I just don’t want to have sex with him and pursuant to this do not want him as a romantic primary. Or: he is my romantic primary? Because he’s who I come home to, and who I think about so much, and I have no interest in anyone else? But I don’t want to fuck him, and later, when we don’t live together, I don’t want him to have the primacy anymore. I tell him, I have a good life: exercise, feel focused, not too focused, knock on wood, friends I love, one of them to come home to, masturbate successfully every morning and night, but he says he’s so sad, and let’s be honest, I’m sad, too! His friends at the beach were nice. You make a world together. You leave it. Miles and I have barely written since what we had to say to each other was, shit, you made my summer so good.
* * *
Seems clear: the one who feels more similar to and comprehensible to the other is the disadvantaged party. Even if you have no solitude or lonesomeness, you can find yourself anxious to spend time with whomever makes you feel most like yourself. To seek the presence of someone who fits you so well that you behave—with them and through them—as though they are not there. Are we better understood spending time with a diversity of people or are we better understood spending time with no one? I still love Max, but drunk I complain that we have nothing to talk about, or none of the same things to talk about, and how it’s wonderful that nevertheless we’ve managed to make so much conversation. I love to cuddle with Max, to kiss his cheeks and neck. There’s an angle from which he looks like the most handsome man there is. You think that if you separate yourself from a feeling of conjoinedness and mutual surveillance, you pry back from the world a life that is more authentically yours, but what truly happens is you’re just miserable again. One articulates so well when miserable. There’s such sharp thought in loneliness. Trouble is, it’s so sharp it’s scary, and it’s pathetic when there’s not even the promise of an audience. So people become artists. For the comfort of solitude with an audience.
Had an online chat with Ivan, who’d gotten a tattoo of some made-up symbol signifying his own artistry to himself. So he can take his shirt off and remember—oh yes, I am an artist. Is anyone in this dumb world even joking? Before this with Max and Lori and two others working in entertainment. Everyone was big and loud. I felt I couldn’t be at my best, behaving this way. The lives of many: when I can’t see them, they seem desirable to me, but once I’m with them, I understand why I had never been there before. I tell Max everything. I have no idea how it affects him. To what degree. Perhaps it doesn’t. If you deliver information like it ought not provoke offence or hurt, this often works. Sadness is always worsened by another feeling it on your behalf, when you feel their shame. Behave as though nothing is wrong and it’s easy to tell the man whose limp balls you sucked and kissed that afternoon, while he massaged his boner out, that you have no interest in and certainly nothing to contribute to his friends’ conversations, though they’re very lovely people. I was drunk last night lying down with Max, so I don’t remember if, among other things, I told him I loved him, but if I said that, too, I’m sure I would have said it with little affect or emphasis. Ivan and I argued about the idea of living an authentic or inauthentic life. I couldn’t tolerate what he meant. Everyone’s life is an authentic realization of their desires and values drawn out through choices that invite consequences, which further inform what they want, within certain constraints. He says at the end of it that if you have regrets, you haven’t lived authentically. I think, no, dissatisfaction is not the same thing: that’s simply having regrets. We all get what we want. I want to be poor and alone with a diversity of confidences and affections, reading a lot. I guess. It’s exciting and invigorating to feel like you must win people over, because, although terrifying, it means you’re being challenged, and you can imagine a better world welcoming you. But feeling as though there’s no one to impress has its benefits, too, in stability and sanity. One always longs to feel the opposite way. I feel good.
Yesterday afternoon with Max, after he came, he said, still glazed over, he wants to see me masturbate, wants to see me make myself come. I said back to him without even thinking, “I’ll take that under consideration.”
* * *
It is autumn and I am filled with love. I can’t escape what I have no option but to return home to. If speakability is love’s essence, oh God. Things are so fucking sayable. Things are sayable absolutely without impediment. No impediment; speakability; filled with love.
Days lately have been very dense. I never know when anything happens.
Each party gets the gift of vulnerability of the other. It’s like all today is my orgasm.
* * *
It is very bad to have a very bad husband, and tiresome to recount, even if the density of living with someone means all the misbehaviour is so detailed. Here’s what Rancière has to say about attention, back in The Ignorant Schoolmaster—I can’t find it. My husband is tricking me. This is what’s worst about my husband. My husband just wants to feel powerful as he’s wanted for years because of his attention problems, among other things.
Normally when I step out of my husband, I’m fine, but he lives here, so I don’t get many opportunities. I don’t need anything from my husband. I don’t need love from him, and I don’t need devotion, and I don’t need care. I prefer to be the one who gives affection. And my husband prefers to receive it. That’s why we’re here. Or he prefers his girlfriend elsewhere who perhaps loves him a different way. What was the Rancière quote about attention? Oh, who knows. That attention is not an ability—it’s a decision, and if you don’t make a decision to grant it to anyone, it reveals contempt both of them and of yourself. I vocalize not wanting him but also my love for him. Last night was the best night we’d had together, and then tonight he had a phone call with Cybil? Like when Lori was here in the apartment this week. I can’t do enough for him. I won’t. Threat of loss stuns me into beginning to ask for things I know that I have said that I do not want from my fucking husband. How and why should the less desiring party be so much more devoted.
* * *
Everyone bothers me except my husband who bothers me. This is how one sits in place in the world.
I’ll never have the time to recount all of what is said in my conversations with Max, and plenty of it is very funny. I feel as though he puts me into competition with others unnecessarily, to test me. Told him, of having Lori over, in the bath, “What you are doing, I am not doing.” One moment I’ll speak with clarity and confidence, articulating myself exactly, and the next moment he turns some new corner, stunning me again. I feel scared and desperate. Despite this, I can’t promise him my future. I can promise him my present. I can promise him that I’ll never put people into competition with him. I can promise him that even if the sex isn’t what I want, I’m satisfied. We’ll have what felt at the time to me like the most emotionally frank conversation we’ve had, or that I’ve perhaps had with anyone, in and after the bath, and then the next night he’ll ask if I’m comfortable returning to a platonic relationship again, and for a few hours I�
�ll feel like I’ve been struck across the head. But say one part of said bath conversation was him asking, finally, “What do you want from me?” and me having no answer for him. Say this morning over coffee—we had sex last night; I felt desperate—he says, “You don’t want to be with me,” and I say, “I do want to be with you now.” On other occasions, it’s more like he’s rejecting me, but for what, I am she who gives him comfort! I’ve seen other people lately. Dinner with Freida and then a visit to a gallery opening, where I did lots of fun chatting the night that preceded the bath. Working at the library. Exercising on the days I don’t feel nausea. Why am I willing to give up more in service of something that I want less? School starts tomorrow. Linguistics classes first. Max says he knows when I’m aggravated with him, because it’s on those occasions that I’ll make hurtful comments about his character. He doesn’t, ever, about mine. But I’m on much better behaviour. Over email, told Noah—who’s coming next weekend to defend his PhD— that he couldn’t stay here anymore due to an unanticipated advancement in a life that moves very quickly. He said, “I hope you mean quickly someplace good.” I said, “Noah, maybe I’ve stopped trying to make judgments on the quality of my life!” I’m not miserable. I feel stress, often, but it vacillates with comfort, and the comfort comes with little effort on my part. Time fucking is dense. If I had more of it to myself I’d gain the perspective necessary to understand what is really going on. What is happening is what’s going on. Do I want to decode desires? Do I want to reveal some truth of how our actions demonstrate an enduring teleological desire? Little would bear this out. We are both acting in service of what we desire during the moments we are together. To touch and to comfort. Ever as I grow, I’m still made to kiss the neck of a complaining man with a handsome face. I keep changing and so do my values, but this continues to satisfy something very primal in me. At the gallery, I spoke to a playwright who said, of comics and actors: they are incredibly brave, and incredibly desperate. And they bring it out in others. I don’t mind suffering uncertainty when the object of my affection doesn’t make me feel like I’m missing something or can’t qualify. Ninety per cent of what’s happening I’m not even doing. This is his complicated life, and I just live here. Two fucking weeks. Each day I am high on pot, but yesterday he came home high on coke, and I was regretful that he hadn’t invited me to that party. Funny that Max and I shouldn’t know what we want from each other when it’s actually so clear: someplace for our words to go, each night. What else. That we’ll keep too watchful an eye on each other for either of us to get depressed when autumn comes. Maybe I will stop making judgments on the quality of my life. Maybe the details of feeling aren’t the truth of feeling—the truth is the action you commit to.
* * *
I’ll always be fucking to standard. That’s a gift God doesn’t offer us all. Domesticity satisfies me and will presumably continue to satisfy me until I suspect it of depriving me of other things. I have a good life and I watched a good movie with Blaise last night, but I was dozing off because of all the talking with Max the night prior, and then with Blaise I was not a valuable conversation partner. I came home and slept alone, early, solid, and this morning ironed Max’s outfit for Rosh Hashanah as he prepared for me a coffee and a bowl of fruit, or he prepared the bowl of fruit for himself and didn’t have time to eat it. He said. Recounting the domestic is funny because you’d recount none of it were you alone. It is not notable; it is the consistent texture of life. I ironed his shirt imperfectly. My wife, she’s terrible. I prefer our life with no obstacles, honestly.
First classes feel good and sharp and brought memories of a feeling of divine sadness for Marianne, who has too much wit and attention and creativity for this world—I thought, she sought her faith because God gave her too much, and in spending her gifts, she could never be repaid sufficiently by others. But what does God give those who produce too much? God sometimes gives them generous departmental funding, at Oxford, where she started her PhD this fall.
What if love, which I had assumed would be a corrective, really acts more as a kind of anti-inflammatory?
What if the only stressful thing is thinking that your desire must be wise and responsible, that it must account for the desire of all parties? If your desire is humble, and knows it knows only itself, it is secure. And if you don’t even bother to desire and skip straight to enjoyment: nothing, nothing beats this.
No proper relationships mean that no one serves a function for you. They are just themselves. They are more complicated than they’re worth. And yet we choose them.
Trust is bizarre and takes too many forms to speak of. Like, I trust that I know what to expect of you. I trust that you won’t subject me to more than I am prepared for. I trust that I know you, and I know how you’re bound to behave. With some you only experience a trust that is solipsistic. Or, until the day you stop, your orgasms are still your own to give.
I pray that people retain their inability so that I may continue to find them adorable, which isn’t very kind at all.
* * *
It occurs to me that you can moderate an appetite without satisfying it, but it doesn’t occur to everyone. You can suppress. Wilfully or by circumstance. But should you?
It’s bizarre that someone might have the ability to soothe you against the very discomfort they have caused you. I always avoid knowing this. It’s what families are built upon. There are those who cause discomfort by pushing and those who cause discomfort by pulling, and I suppose I know which of these I live with. How many times have I told Max that our relationship is familial though we handle each other’s genitals probably daily. I don’t want to lose what I love to another. I mean my interests. My heart palpitations are back, but Max still suffers worse, on a daily basis, from feelings of purposelessness and lack of direction. He speaks of my lust like it’s a decision and this doesn’t sound wrong. You forget when you live a certain way that maybe you could have another version of the same thing, which would be better suited to you. Honestly, you both could. He said I was a universe. Who isn’t. In whose world is it not a different world.
It’s not that I think I don’t deserve pleasure, just that I don’t think anyone else should have to give it to me. At least no one I’ve known yet. It’s so hard to tell someone, in order for me to come, you’d have to leave the room.
* * *
Catherine Millet line about intestines working according to primitive software popped into my head, because me too: I work according to primitive software. I got drunk and blacked out and threw up and put up further divisions between me and my love. In order to prove my shame to myself? What if you then come home and your sweetheart is still there, even if you aren’t sure of him? I found it impossible to recount for Caroline the last two and a half weeks in all their density, and then when we went to a concert together, I felt fucking high. Many strangers, young people, new people, beautiful people, people I wanted to meet, bands playing music that sounded like the 1990s that I was nostalgic for musically because my lover taught me about those times in the mid-2000s. The diversion I enacted was I fucked some very handsome stranger boy simply because I could, I guess, or I wanted to feel again what it would be like to fuck a young, healthy, virile person. And what is it like? It’s like anything else: exercise, and it’s better coming home to the man whose face you hold even if you feel you’ve been tricked into the relationship. I felt ashamed today and slept through all my classes, in the park and in the chapel at Hart House, because Max, whom I’d cheated, was at home. Hungover and sad, felt doomed to myself. It was sweet when I got home. Shame and guilt compress when we’re alone, but present with others, you just go on. It makes sense that people do any number of terrible things to others simply learning that what you don’t bring up or think about almost hasn’t happened. Last night’s blackout was my first in months, but it doesn’t mean entering a new phase of blackouts; it was a night. There have been days when I’ve felt good and secu
re and like Max is a centring force and makes me whole. There have been days when I’ve felt focused and disciplined. There have also been days like today, which I brought upon myself.
* * *
Even shared, my life can be purified. I asked last night if Max still planned to go back to another and he said, “No,” and I said, “Good.” I haven’t told him what I did. I feel horrible for my compulsions. I feel horrible for having my cunt scraped out within minutes of throwing up uncontrollably by someone whose last name I don’t know, whose health I don’t know. I don’t trust Max so I want to construct an equivalence with my own behaviour. I wanted to. I’m done.
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