Journal 20.05.10

For the first time, I experience serious emotional pain while reading, for the first time in a long time

Each time I see father, I realize that the prospect of living this life in this house is but unbearable; just like Christianity is unbearable for humans… What is then bearable? Cigarettes are the only opiates available to make waft this despair. Daily sleepiness and slumber is the only release from this mad nothingness and headaches a release into raw life. For a change, today I was in no mood to swallow food at all. I think my younger brother is the only reason to stay alive; everything else is just a poor predicament.

Finished reading Michael Cunningham, but I am certainly not through with it.

Tomorrow is grandmother´s birthday and I couldn´t care even a little bit. It will be a timely opportunity to make a call that otherwise I would never be brave enough to do: My sister. I wonder what could happen if I would expose my situation to her; would she maybe understand. I don´t know. But just as much as I demand much attention from the world, I am ought to provide it as well, in many a situation for so many people, that being said, of course with the sole exception of my father, my brother and the closest circumscribed perimeter. To them I should not even tend the self-asserting hand of charitable pity. I wonder why I always have to listen when people are talking about my past and the reason why I had such positive reaction to my untimely teen exile: The answer is always the same, that my father used to beat me violently and harass me emotionally as well with just as much forceful violence of sorts; that my grandmother insisted that she had thrown me out of her home because I was an alcoholic, a junkie and a queer; that I had no stable home and had to wander aimlessly between the parental home which was not parental at all, the warm but historically accidented and preposterously no less violent care of an ignorant and ill-minded grandmother, not to mention as well physically ill and a serial liar; that there was nothing they could do about the fact that I was handled with so much unrestrained physical violence and that they suffered a lot on my behalf, that there´s so much they could do, but that they had no way to interfere in a parent-son relationship. I shouldn´t feel insulted at all because it is nothing but the truth however a half-truth; a half truth as always is a lot more dangerous than a whole lie. They were also active participants in the endurance of my upbringing and held no less than prejudice about my homosexuality than my own father and family did and certainly they must have had that selfsame prejudice about my sexual orientation much before I had it myself. They also actively engaged in making me shed tears over every breakfast and every dinner; they were active complainers to the central bureau of information that handled facts about my life and gratuitously distributed physical punishments. It is true that my father was allegedly a drunkard that too often failed to fulfill his responsibilities with life and that he was carefree to see other women younger than himself and it is also true that he bears a pathological wrath and he is fairly ignorant for a person with a college degree and unfairly dumb for someone so accomplished in worldly affairs; too greedy and selfish and peevish for someone so miserably poor and yet too well educated for the kind of both material and spiritual poverty of which he is such a timeless representative. Yes, it is all true… But I wasn´t I who remained married to him to this day and that year after year failed to speak the truth and about the truth as the most basic principle of an unshakable life philosophy.

Reading the novel had a lasting impact on me: It stirred my unhappiness from the complacency of the bottomless pit where it has not only refugee status but permanent resident and soon it will hold a citizenship ritual. There was a transmogrification between my own life and that of Jonathan, between the New Yorker Jim described in Gillian Rose´s “Love´s Work” and the deponent Gillian Rose herself. The four characters amalgamated into a sole perverted metaphysics of survival and mediocre “stay-alive-for-the-others” ethic; unsettlingly coupled with images from a rarefied apocalyptic universe riddled by nothing but grandiose loves. Both lovenessless and lovefulness are selfish affairs. As of this moment I think I feel much contempt for the youthful rabidity of the young Jonathan and an increased insatiable sexual appetite for the likes of his adult person and body; if anything I would marry my life off to the prospect of his personality of unhealth. Well, except for the fact that then I would have to be content with being married to myself. What I am really wearing out from is not the fact that I am living a futile and miserable life but that I am undertaking everything as future project; I´ve turned my whole life into a train station that will at some point be future bound and at this, I have destroyed the present with the greatest possible zeal. How do I make myself home now in the present? In this present tense that I´ve avowedly been propelled to destroy in every single stance of it: I forfeited my friendships because of the love I left hanging in the past and because of the trust I hold in the future; I have abandoned the claim to all my earthly belongings because of the hope that they will un-needed in the distant future and all in all, I am just not alive anymore. I am but deceitfully abandoned to the prospect of miracle and therefore, I am just not living. To a great and fearful extent, I sit idly in wait for such miracles in part because of the impossible prospects that I face. If anything, what I need is not precisely to flee from this life into another life but to seize up the opportunity to live this life: I need to find a job that at the very least will allow me to leave this house forever. I feel so miserable at the prospect of time, at the prospect that I am getting old and that youth is ever so vanishing from the lines of expression in my forehead and from my spirit. I feel I haven´t grown up; I could as well be seventeen years old and not by any means realize that I am no longer a boy, yet I don´t know how I am supposed to do it. My greatest fear is the prospect of a fatal illness and withal, the idea that I am just short of enough time to live. That´s why I have salvaged so much energy for a brief and spectacularly intense version of the immediate future while altogether not doing absolutely anything to remedy the ills of the present that I´ve wrought upon myself and postpone the future ad infinitum. The truth is that I´m going to be soon twenty-six years old and yet I´ve never had a real relationship with anybody: I´ve loved many people but I haven´t been loved as I think I would have deserved and I have to live from now onwards with the fact that my youth, however spectacular, has been completely loveless. First I loved Nicolás, a person I actually never met but gazed into through years lacking all ability to move forward with my decided feeling; then I loved Fernando but was completely unable to follow through and I had to bear the most vanquishing defeat right at the beginning, that he wrote me a farewell letter is not important, the point here is that such love never flourished and Fernando chased a life for himself, what I was so unable to do; then I loved Yuval and so soon thereafter I faced betrayal the way a woman would but yet was too immature to stay up and simply despaired. Then I loved other people thinking that sleeping with them one entire night would suffice to start a relationship. I definitely loved Ofer and he loved me too, but enough to bear the burden of my life luggage that at the time couldn´t be fit even into a palace from the Arabian nights; then I loved Vitaly and he truly loved me as well but I was unable to spend more than a few weeks with him and his world was as fragile as mine so that I had to give up all claims on his love. Then I thought I loved Markus but it is complicated when you fall in love with an ambitious and cruel Catholic priest who definitely didn´t love anything about me but my way of speaking and my body; I think he was so much more into Levi than he was into me. I was clearly infatuated with Dror, who was the person who made love the best to me until now, but he had a girlfriend and I think he must be happily married by now. Then I loved Santiago, I loved him with the uncanny of youth, with reckless impetus, with carefree devotion, but I broke the rules of love the way I always do and lost him to some godforsaken French little college town and was never given the chance to both love him or make love to him the way I should have. And with this, you reach the age of twenty-six as an eternal bachelor and are still, waiting for your first love. Well, this is very sad. I have to live with it though, especially at the miser prospect of love when my belly is not longer what it used to be, when my forehead is wrinkled by my endless preoccupations with the future, and when at this age I do not count even with the most basic means to have a love affairs: I can barely buy half a pack of cigarettes a few times a week; I would be unable to buy a cup of coffee, leave alone to go on a holiday. There are two ghostly appearances amidst my current lovelessness, and I call them loveless because they are not real – at least not yet: Friðirik is so much as everything I could possibly want (callous, mature and caring) except for the fact that he is in Iceland; a country where I might never be able to go if things stand as they have until now and I think in a couple of weeks I will have to cut off all my contact with him in order not to be ashamed by the fact that I will be completely unable to fulfill my promises, I don´t even talk about promises of not falling in love but about simple stuff like actually getting to know him personally. Another ghost: He goes by the name of Carlos which must be decidedly fake and I haven´t seen anything of him but a beautiful butt that anyone in his right state of mind would like to fuck. He was living in Dubai and came to Bogotá in order to make himself at home but utterly failed: He understands how much I despise this place and how poor everything seems to me; I guess that is enough for me to develop an attraction. Yet he´s everything but real at the moment and should be become realized, I don´t even have enough money to take as much as bus in order to go and throw myself to the arms of a person that could at least sate me sexually. I need to find out a way to live in the present and to just leave this miser place.