The Gut Chronicles: Closure.
Dear George,
This letter will almost probably never reach you because it is addressed to someone I don’t know; to my idea of a someone I once figured was a vital appendage to my life; to a notion, a concept and a romance in the truest fantastical sense. I invested so much hope, energy and blind but robust faith into this balloon-like phantasm, so desperate was I to satiate what ill-defined paramerters of love and romantic fulfilment I’d previously entertained. I invented you based on the scant and nebulous symbols you emitted on our first sleep-deprived night together; I was the writing I read between your few spoken lines – it took me a while to step out from the shadows – and to reconcile this has been an arduous and painful trip. Like many arduous and painful trips, the revelations have been at least equally intense. Your presence; your existence became the stage in my theatre of idealism and I poured every dramatic conceit available into this fleeting vessel. I tried on every costume of every hue in love’s wardrobe to acquaint myself with the taste of loss desire, guilty lustfulness, hopes scrambled, bliss exploded, faith galvanised by modest epiphanies, when on occasion your actions would sing in tune with my ideals.
The first time you broke it all off I intercepted your text whilst in the toilet at work, and those 150x characters changed me more than 100,000 words of my favourite ever work of literature ever have could or might. That afternoon, three hours into a debilitating and hysterical fit of tears and despair, I got sent home from work. Add that to the inventory of transactions; thus kickstarted the waveform of our brief but tumultuous romance – I invested such volume, depth and complexity into your every – and frequently dull- utterance that it became impossible for your words to breathe outside of the zeppelin of my soaring, apocalyptic imagination. My sub-schizophrenic stream-of-consciousness shredding and mutating your naïve memes into stark evil, agenda-governed clones; chattering wind-up dolls marching into the dawn of our malaise. And yet my resolve never wavered. Whereas you were and are content to crystallise your woolly impulses into abrupt and devastating decisions, I was alternately seared, lashed and cauterised by the weight of my responses to them. Glibly, you’d text news of our latest split with the matter-of-factness of a veteran newsreader. For the first few instances, I’d be torn up, my cynicism exhumed and battered raw by the cold shovel of your bombshell. Then with increasing regularity you’d be quick to resume where we left off, and I’d dismiss your spells as the by-product of a young mind negotiating the landscape of a new attachment. I suspect you judged me as “intense” and “heavy”, and yet given such taciturn and volatile posturing, how would even the most serene and self-assured player react?
I’m barely convinced you ever existed, given how much your solidity was based on the flesh of my ideas wrapped around the admittedly beautiful bones of your physical form. If a vacuum is laid open to the world, then the world climbs inside, as an infection patronises a wound. Perhaps this can be read as an absolute distillation of love? A harmonious dialogue between two people’s idealising of each other – a mutually, and happily blind participation in a great lie, where the psycho-emotional work of each participant remains unacknowledged except between the most ardently and comfortably analytical of punters. So much of long-flourishing romance seems to be based on a mutual and indomitable willingness to interpret your co-pilot idealistically. The castle of love can collapse as nondescriptly as a pool of sand once that foundation is banished in a wash; a blink. Once that rare beam of objectivity illuminates the holes in the sails, the yellow stain and errant threading on the sheets of halloween spectres, the boom mic invading the frame, the artifice snared and paralysed by the light of the hunter’s torch.
I don’t love you anymore, because what I loved never existed and the theatre has become an exhausting contrivance. I can hear the stagehand whispering; the dialogue has become leaden, club-footed and vulgar; I no longer find your banal chatter endearing, the sweetness of the innocence I projected onto your fair-skinned screen has soured into a bored stupour. I was so eager to learn to love and in that respect you’ve been a healthy endeavour, the fall-out of which I’m attempting to process philosophically and with much faith in the concept of fallibilism. No experiments are failures if they yield results as learning can be gleaned from all data – even an absence of data – when contextualised with perspective.
I’ve inhabited the various mindsets of a romantic nosedive – the finding of solace in confidantes, the rage and resentment, the wishing of ill-tidings on the absent party (although now I realise how truly absent you were from day one) and yet I toed only the shores of self-pity. I declare this not because I regard myself as the heart’s most robust trooper, but because I hate the cheap, squalid quagmire of that particular attribute; the dirty speed of emotion next to which mescaline may be the blissful, unconditional love I’ve so far experienced only in solitude. Given the implicit barking blitzkrieg gaping inside each and every human heart (the natural and only reaction to an environment whose engine is chaos) perhaps investing all of one’s emotional hard-currency into one other being is the most foolish conceivable act. When the membrane of faith collapses, all that remains is a decision based largely on the state of decay. Do you abandon the skeleton who’s hitherto celestial image you’ve been fucking, or do you keep grinding those old bones until you’re both a subterranean powder bound by the cements of age, self-doubt, comfort, familiarity, and ultimately complacency?
The summation at this point is: all romantic love between two humans is compromise, checkmate, and the longer you can pump blood into the phantom in the magic lantern, who’s dance brings such ecstasy to your dreams, the greater the capacity of your emotional flux to excite and devastate. Once the artist exhausts his material he ceases to breathe, when you fail to find that fresh element in the ideal of your partner, all is rendered stale. You are reduced to either flogging the horse or dismounting. The former, tantamount to selling it for glue with which to fasten your memories to the present – where nostalgia replaces action, where a photograph replaces an event. The latter, you send your steed packing to the wilderness and are condemned to walk again, your feet susceptible to sores, your knees to arthritis, your line of sight a good distance beneath the visible heights of the foregone union. Your horizons have slipped. I’ve realised you can attain similar heights alone, and thus perhaps the only possibility for an enduring and brilliant relationship between two humans is for both participants to be entirely and comfortably accustomed to solitude, and to functioning healthily within the limitless confines of their own hearts and consciousness’. Dependency breeds disappointment, preconceptions spawn resentments and the projection of unsatiated ideals onto the lacking party.
I entertained vengeful thoughts. Momentarily my fantasies laboured on the image of you kidnapped, raped and strangled. I decided to want to administer to you the worst imaginable fates; merely to elicit something resembling a pure sentiment from this corpse of a boy I pumped so much of my hopeful blood into. The truest vocalisations of authentic emotion occur either upon orgasm or under abject suffering; I wanted to flay the performance from the doll and masturbate as the flesh beneath seethed like a disturbed wasp nest. At another point, I decided to want to abase myself to neediness. I decided that I loved you, that I depended upon your cool, distant presence to complete me. I eroticised your bewitching of me. I empowered you with my reliance upon your approval and acceptance of me. This conferring of power I found profoundly erotic; when I charged you with this sense of command over my emotional trajectory – and this notion of deferment has always been a peculiarly fetishistic transaction for me. My erotic concession to self-destruction is the deifying of a boy into an untouchably potent entity whose dominion of me is absolute, who drives rabid my urge to worship, flatter and compliment. This is how it played out with you. In these circumstances, I would go wild with sexual frenzy at your apathetic passivity as I study and pray at the altar of your divine body; as you ration our kisses; dictate what I can and cannot do; as you deny me interaction, fusion and warmth, my body and spirit shimmer with sexual excitement. And yet, I genuinely believe, based on our few sexual moments together that you have eroticised your need to be needed into a sexual craving to be worshipped by the guys that you sleep with. That first time we crept illicitly upstairs to the forbidden sanctuary of the double bedroom, you reclined corpse-like. Aware of my fondness for your tongue, you simply opened your mouth and offered it for me to bite, suck and engage with – not even the dialogue of a kiss – just you, silent, stationary, tongue available to my worship. This will remain a salient image from our time together.
I wonder if to your mind, the power dynamic appeared the inverse of my interpretation – to an unbiased audience I would doubtless have appeared the active partner - and yet within the cocoon of our coupling, and by manipulating the nature of my actions, you invariably held the reins, driving me insane through the denial and rationing of access to certain parts of you. You controlled my fix, and my concession to this base imperfection still confounds, enrages and arouses me – the awareness and dislike of my perverse trappings only makes their erotic qualities soar. I would chew and nuzzle your armpits long into my years, and in a sexually excited state I would sacrifice every quality of life, to be stranded on the desert island of your body beneath our dome of neuroses and excruciating teases.
Upon externalising all of this as prose I realise how enormously the shelf-life of our fling was fuelled by sexual dependency, need and desire. I’d tolerate your wildly fluctuating moods in the hope that my patience would pay off in a session of ecstatic foraging. Obviously it would be utterly sociopathic to discuss such transactions in these terms from within the eye of the storm – in relationships we poeticise the basic sexual need into the language and performance of love rituals, if only to galvanise our flimsy reckoning of ourselves as social, civilised beings. Fortunately, the storm having passed, I now appreciate that you were essentially dull, passionless, crudely unformed, selfish, crippled by neuroses, superficial, and that I’m happy in this epiphany, whilst being grateful to nobody in particular for our time together, grateful primarily for the rich tableaux of realisations I’ve encountered in the hinterland of solitude. My textbook romance with a sixteen-year-old called George. I contended that when, inevitably, the romance flatlined, I’d hate you and channel all of my negative energies into destroying you for having used and betrayed me, but my posthumous insight is textured much more mildly. I just don’t like you. You are no longer remotely engaging except as a blackboard on which I chalk my analysis of ‘love’s unravelling. Perhaps you were the dress rehearsal for something more substantial and enduring? Perhaps my dalliance with that stunningly gorgeous drug tsar may blossom into a beautiful and mutually healthy romance, bound into fortitude by the self-sufficiency of both parties? Preconceptions, clearly can kill, especially when applied to or of other humans, so fuck the contemplative conjecture. I’ll leave this open-ended.
In my apathy as to what you think or don’t think anymore, I’m finally satisfied in the knowledge that I’m totally over you. If I were nostalgic I may be sad, but I can disassociate the memories from the present enough to safely dwell in them for the duration of a satisfying wank before detaching immediately and without remorseful pangs of yearning. The future, I suspect has so much more exciting potential than the past and may just be the only temporal state that can be built upon, so thanks George. I’d be content to never hear from you again. I say this not because it would bring flooding back painful memories, not because I hate you and resent your treatment of me, but because what you now represent is something so uninspired and unworthy of my time and energy that the notion of you only bores and irritates me. No vendetta, no smear campaign, no unnaturally protracted masquerade of a friendship salvaged from the wreck… Adios, and despite your irrelevancy to my life from here-on-in, I genuinely wish you well, whilst recognising how much internal modification you require to be able to manifest this. All the same, many thanks, onwards and upwards. It’s been invaluably educational,
Nick.x
PS:
A quote from the boy himself:
“The only thing I have to look forward to is who I’ll next go out with.”
- GSL, 26th December 2005.
This letter will almost probably never reach you because it is addressed to someone I don’t know; to my idea of a someone I once figured was a vital appendage to my life; to a notion, a concept and a romance in the truest fantastical sense. I invested so much hope, energy and blind but robust faith into this balloon-like phantasm, so desperate was I to satiate what ill-defined paramerters of love and romantic fulfilment I’d previously entertained. I invented you based on the scant and nebulous symbols you emitted on our first sleep-deprived night together; I was the writing I read between your few spoken lines – it took me a while to step out from the shadows – and to reconcile this has been an arduous and painful trip. Like many arduous and painful trips, the revelations have been at least equally intense. Your presence; your existence became the stage in my theatre of idealism and I poured every dramatic conceit available into this fleeting vessel. I tried on every costume of every hue in love’s wardrobe to acquaint myself with the taste of loss desire, guilty lustfulness, hopes scrambled, bliss exploded, faith galvanised by modest epiphanies, when on occasion your actions would sing in tune with my ideals.
The first time you broke it all off I intercepted your text whilst in the toilet at work, and those 150x characters changed me more than 100,000 words of my favourite ever work of literature ever have could or might. That afternoon, three hours into a debilitating and hysterical fit of tears and despair, I got sent home from work. Add that to the inventory of transactions; thus kickstarted the waveform of our brief but tumultuous romance – I invested such volume, depth and complexity into your every – and frequently dull- utterance that it became impossible for your words to breathe outside of the zeppelin of my soaring, apocalyptic imagination. My sub-schizophrenic stream-of-consciousness shredding and mutating your naïve memes into stark evil, agenda-governed clones; chattering wind-up dolls marching into the dawn of our malaise. And yet my resolve never wavered. Whereas you were and are content to crystallise your woolly impulses into abrupt and devastating decisions, I was alternately seared, lashed and cauterised by the weight of my responses to them. Glibly, you’d text news of our latest split with the matter-of-factness of a veteran newsreader. For the first few instances, I’d be torn up, my cynicism exhumed and battered raw by the cold shovel of your bombshell. Then with increasing regularity you’d be quick to resume where we left off, and I’d dismiss your spells as the by-product of a young mind negotiating the landscape of a new attachment. I suspect you judged me as “intense” and “heavy”, and yet given such taciturn and volatile posturing, how would even the most serene and self-assured player react?
I’m barely convinced you ever existed, given how much your solidity was based on the flesh of my ideas wrapped around the admittedly beautiful bones of your physical form. If a vacuum is laid open to the world, then the world climbs inside, as an infection patronises a wound. Perhaps this can be read as an absolute distillation of love? A harmonious dialogue between two people’s idealising of each other – a mutually, and happily blind participation in a great lie, where the psycho-emotional work of each participant remains unacknowledged except between the most ardently and comfortably analytical of punters. So much of long-flourishing romance seems to be based on a mutual and indomitable willingness to interpret your co-pilot idealistically. The castle of love can collapse as nondescriptly as a pool of sand once that foundation is banished in a wash; a blink. Once that rare beam of objectivity illuminates the holes in the sails, the yellow stain and errant threading on the sheets of halloween spectres, the boom mic invading the frame, the artifice snared and paralysed by the light of the hunter’s torch.
I don’t love you anymore, because what I loved never existed and the theatre has become an exhausting contrivance. I can hear the stagehand whispering; the dialogue has become leaden, club-footed and vulgar; I no longer find your banal chatter endearing, the sweetness of the innocence I projected onto your fair-skinned screen has soured into a bored stupour. I was so eager to learn to love and in that respect you’ve been a healthy endeavour, the fall-out of which I’m attempting to process philosophically and with much faith in the concept of fallibilism. No experiments are failures if they yield results as learning can be gleaned from all data – even an absence of data – when contextualised with perspective.
I’ve inhabited the various mindsets of a romantic nosedive – the finding of solace in confidantes, the rage and resentment, the wishing of ill-tidings on the absent party (although now I realise how truly absent you were from day one) and yet I toed only the shores of self-pity. I declare this not because I regard myself as the heart’s most robust trooper, but because I hate the cheap, squalid quagmire of that particular attribute; the dirty speed of emotion next to which mescaline may be the blissful, unconditional love I’ve so far experienced only in solitude. Given the implicit barking blitzkrieg gaping inside each and every human heart (the natural and only reaction to an environment whose engine is chaos) perhaps investing all of one’s emotional hard-currency into one other being is the most foolish conceivable act. When the membrane of faith collapses, all that remains is a decision based largely on the state of decay. Do you abandon the skeleton who’s hitherto celestial image you’ve been fucking, or do you keep grinding those old bones until you’re both a subterranean powder bound by the cements of age, self-doubt, comfort, familiarity, and ultimately complacency?
The summation at this point is: all romantic love between two humans is compromise, checkmate, and the longer you can pump blood into the phantom in the magic lantern, who’s dance brings such ecstasy to your dreams, the greater the capacity of your emotional flux to excite and devastate. Once the artist exhausts his material he ceases to breathe, when you fail to find that fresh element in the ideal of your partner, all is rendered stale. You are reduced to either flogging the horse or dismounting. The former, tantamount to selling it for glue with which to fasten your memories to the present – where nostalgia replaces action, where a photograph replaces an event. The latter, you send your steed packing to the wilderness and are condemned to walk again, your feet susceptible to sores, your knees to arthritis, your line of sight a good distance beneath the visible heights of the foregone union. Your horizons have slipped. I’ve realised you can attain similar heights alone, and thus perhaps the only possibility for an enduring and brilliant relationship between two humans is for both participants to be entirely and comfortably accustomed to solitude, and to functioning healthily within the limitless confines of their own hearts and consciousness’. Dependency breeds disappointment, preconceptions spawn resentments and the projection of unsatiated ideals onto the lacking party.
I entertained vengeful thoughts. Momentarily my fantasies laboured on the image of you kidnapped, raped and strangled. I decided to want to administer to you the worst imaginable fates; merely to elicit something resembling a pure sentiment from this corpse of a boy I pumped so much of my hopeful blood into. The truest vocalisations of authentic emotion occur either upon orgasm or under abject suffering; I wanted to flay the performance from the doll and masturbate as the flesh beneath seethed like a disturbed wasp nest. At another point, I decided to want to abase myself to neediness. I decided that I loved you, that I depended upon your cool, distant presence to complete me. I eroticised your bewitching of me. I empowered you with my reliance upon your approval and acceptance of me. This conferring of power I found profoundly erotic; when I charged you with this sense of command over my emotional trajectory – and this notion of deferment has always been a peculiarly fetishistic transaction for me. My erotic concession to self-destruction is the deifying of a boy into an untouchably potent entity whose dominion of me is absolute, who drives rabid my urge to worship, flatter and compliment. This is how it played out with you. In these circumstances, I would go wild with sexual frenzy at your apathetic passivity as I study and pray at the altar of your divine body; as you ration our kisses; dictate what I can and cannot do; as you deny me interaction, fusion and warmth, my body and spirit shimmer with sexual excitement. And yet, I genuinely believe, based on our few sexual moments together that you have eroticised your need to be needed into a sexual craving to be worshipped by the guys that you sleep with. That first time we crept illicitly upstairs to the forbidden sanctuary of the double bedroom, you reclined corpse-like. Aware of my fondness for your tongue, you simply opened your mouth and offered it for me to bite, suck and engage with – not even the dialogue of a kiss – just you, silent, stationary, tongue available to my worship. This will remain a salient image from our time together.
I wonder if to your mind, the power dynamic appeared the inverse of my interpretation – to an unbiased audience I would doubtless have appeared the active partner - and yet within the cocoon of our coupling, and by manipulating the nature of my actions, you invariably held the reins, driving me insane through the denial and rationing of access to certain parts of you. You controlled my fix, and my concession to this base imperfection still confounds, enrages and arouses me – the awareness and dislike of my perverse trappings only makes their erotic qualities soar. I would chew and nuzzle your armpits long into my years, and in a sexually excited state I would sacrifice every quality of life, to be stranded on the desert island of your body beneath our dome of neuroses and excruciating teases.
Upon externalising all of this as prose I realise how enormously the shelf-life of our fling was fuelled by sexual dependency, need and desire. I’d tolerate your wildly fluctuating moods in the hope that my patience would pay off in a session of ecstatic foraging. Obviously it would be utterly sociopathic to discuss such transactions in these terms from within the eye of the storm – in relationships we poeticise the basic sexual need into the language and performance of love rituals, if only to galvanise our flimsy reckoning of ourselves as social, civilised beings. Fortunately, the storm having passed, I now appreciate that you were essentially dull, passionless, crudely unformed, selfish, crippled by neuroses, superficial, and that I’m happy in this epiphany, whilst being grateful to nobody in particular for our time together, grateful primarily for the rich tableaux of realisations I’ve encountered in the hinterland of solitude. My textbook romance with a sixteen-year-old called George. I contended that when, inevitably, the romance flatlined, I’d hate you and channel all of my negative energies into destroying you for having used and betrayed me, but my posthumous insight is textured much more mildly. I just don’t like you. You are no longer remotely engaging except as a blackboard on which I chalk my analysis of ‘love’s unravelling. Perhaps you were the dress rehearsal for something more substantial and enduring? Perhaps my dalliance with that stunningly gorgeous drug tsar may blossom into a beautiful and mutually healthy romance, bound into fortitude by the self-sufficiency of both parties? Preconceptions, clearly can kill, especially when applied to or of other humans, so fuck the contemplative conjecture. I’ll leave this open-ended.
In my apathy as to what you think or don’t think anymore, I’m finally satisfied in the knowledge that I’m totally over you. If I were nostalgic I may be sad, but I can disassociate the memories from the present enough to safely dwell in them for the duration of a satisfying wank before detaching immediately and without remorseful pangs of yearning. The future, I suspect has so much more exciting potential than the past and may just be the only temporal state that can be built upon, so thanks George. I’d be content to never hear from you again. I say this not because it would bring flooding back painful memories, not because I hate you and resent your treatment of me, but because what you now represent is something so uninspired and unworthy of my time and energy that the notion of you only bores and irritates me. No vendetta, no smear campaign, no unnaturally protracted masquerade of a friendship salvaged from the wreck… Adios, and despite your irrelevancy to my life from here-on-in, I genuinely wish you well, whilst recognising how much internal modification you require to be able to manifest this. All the same, many thanks, onwards and upwards. It’s been invaluably educational,
Nick.x
PS:
A quote from the boy himself:
“The only thing I have to look forward to is who I’ll next go out with.”
- GSL, 26th December 2005.
posted by Nick Hudson at 10:27 AM
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