I can´t bear the taste of food anymore… It is like being someone else, months and months, the same dishes over and over, at more or less the same hour, the same dishware, the same cook, the same imprecations, the same lack of intimacy, the same burgeoning excess of details. Pain in the gums… Thinking about having sex with a stranger in the morning; under my present raving illness of heart it couldn´t amount to much more than swindling with pigs on the mud, under the effect of drugs and absence from oneself. I feel I need it, that I just need to get out of this prison and see some of the world but yet I´m so unable to get up from the bed, to pick up my own body into life. The only motivation I hold onto is that I hate my father with the all too familiar hatred after a life of misunderstandings and bad translations of one another´s lives. I feel ailing and ready to sleep forever or at least into old age, to skip through the rest of my youth, but my hormones tell me exactly the opposite. My tiredness is completely not normal, it is more like the tiredness of illness, of broken hearts, of the little things that happen in life: Sorrow over a piece of China that broke but complete indifference to what the world used to mean to us. The only thing that matters is to leave home and to be walked out by the hand of misfortune into the misery of the night in the streets. I guess my adamant refusal to swallow food has much to do with the idea that I have to get used to not eating much food, only the necessary for a mediocre version of survival. Not swallowing food is also a means to punish my father – not that he´s too interested in my suffering; it´s just the defiant position in which I refuse to sit at the table next to him. As if to show him that I´m here but completely absent from him. That I´m not his son and that I´m already somebody else; ever since I came back from Jerusalem but that I had been way too occupied with surviving as to show him; now I´m still surviving but the tiredness is so overwhelming taxing that I need to show how much I disregard not life, but life with him and the petty enterprises of his despicable and infinitesimally belittled existence; so much unlike mine.
What makes my current abandonment of my own person and my insanity so bitter and hopeless is that I am quite lucid on what is happening around me and to me but I refuse to comment and especially the fact I´ve ruled out suicide.
List of stories not yet closed with people: I haven´t been able to meet any of my childhood friends ever since I came back. I don´t get the reason why Camilo wrote me off so suddenly from his life, he was somebody I truly loved at the time and through the years. Fernando is a finished sequence, he´s really found a life for himself in which my philosophical diatribes have no place lest should they lead to sleazy sex. I would like to see Vitaly again in order to finally know whether I love him or whether I´ve just lived with this shadow in my closet over the course of these years. I definitely would like to see Tamir once more in order to find out whether he could in any way love me the way I could adore his passion and his mordacity and his simplicity. Katherina is a whole different matter: She´s the person I love the most in this world. I want to see Ivan in order to find out whether I can live with his friendship steered from any Christian hope and from any secular irony. I haven´t seen Levy in order to ask him personally to forgive me for having hurt him so badly. I need to pay back my debts to Mara and to Oren so that they will find out that even in spite of my misery, there were people I loved and that I´ve been completely true to my ideas all the way through. I need to find Santiago; this is but an unavoidable decree, perhaps only in order to sink again into bitter disappointment about the clumsy nature of his personality and his sad banality. I need to walk down the streets of Paris in order to find a grave in my mind for Veronica; this includes a real friendship with Florence and an afternoon in the sun with Danielle Cohen-Levinas. I must meet Eveline again when I am a little more grown up and defined as an intellectual and I hope with all my heart that she will not die before that – I could never recover from such a blow. I need to get into Dvir´s bed so many times more in order to find out whether I despise him or fancy him just as badly. I also hope Arie is not dead and that I will be able to see him again – under this rubric I also include Clara and Raquel. I wonder if I get ever to see the grave of Kela Seltzer and I am quite sure that her husband is dead by now. I need to speak with Adam Frank about my past and to renew such beautiful friendship that we had at some point and I so ungratefully rejected because of my anxiety. I want to see Adar in her married life with her husband. I need to find my mother one day. This seems like a lot to accomplish in a life that never really started. I need to go and live in Iceland and get to know my dear Hope.
I think I´ve never been in love really but on the other hand I am not the kind of person who is in love with love; I might be only in love with the idea that somebody could love me both physically, intellectually and emotionally and too soon thereafter I am let down or just utterly disappointed and disastrously bored.
I devoured “The Hours” in one sitting; and I am a lot less hurt than I am elated, which is a frantic thing, I feel at the same time revitalized and so much more dead inside; one hour more or one hour less, what difference does it make? It can, actually make all the difference in the world, the deference we can tend to it compassionately enough. I could surely enjoy all this if my mind weren´t all this troubled about my solitude and especially about my poverty; however I think the latter is only superficial for in the course of the last month I´ve achieved much more than ever before in my life as far as the development of my thoughts is concerned, in the middle of such abject poverty, of such personal filthiness and of such unremorseful undevotion to life as a whole. I am still so angry at everything because of all the time that is being lost in between the unfinished, ever unfinished, chapters of my life. I am so fully aware of the possible situation of death and because I am decidedly filled by anguish and relief in this selfsame awareness, it is that I write at all. I don´t even know what I write, I think it´s not even mine anymore, I don´t own it and I certainly can´t explain it; it is as being thirty years old now loomed just around the corner and that at this beautiful, fragile, virile and strongest age I were but completely unable to move in the world; to accept the gifts that it has offered me perhaps in a more stunning and miraculous fashion than it has to most people I´ve known; but it never seems to be enough, I never seem to derive enough pleasure or enough knowledge or enough passion out of anything. I seem to be all the time so occupied in killing myself without being sufficiently devoted to the grandeur of the enterprise; there´s so much debauchery at present and there has been just too much I haven´t given to the world or to myself… But I feel at the moment that there´s this unbearable crack opening between myself and the world and that this Work might be the only power that be that can hold enough healing power not to heal but to transform this into some kind of reality; less shady and less presumptuous, less whimsical but also a lot more vivid and colorful, a lot brighter and lively. The truth is that I´ve been cowardly lazy and that´s all what can be said right now. I have to break the crack that is now just opening into a fuller wound, I have to make it bleed until there´s nothing but a pale-rose box full of scorching bones and dust. I can´t shelter from the life I am ought to live anymore, I can´t shelter in the hatred I feel for my father or in my sentimental miseries, both of which always seem too small when compared to what has been achieved but that in spite of everything hasn´t gained a fuller shape on account of my debauchery. The reason why I haven´t been able to make anything out of this, is because there´s nothing that interests me more than the simplicity of the everyday, the obviousness of it all, that´s what I want to write about for the rest of my life; even if that´s not going to be too long or accomplished. It seems that right now the wisest and most sensitive decision were to drown but yet there´s so much I still need to swim against. The following days are going to be very difficult because father and I will become vindictive of each other and will no longer bear each other´s presence until one day I will find myself in another bed, in another life, in another world, and without knowing it at all, beginning life for the nth time. This just cannot be avoided. There´s nothing that can hamper this tide of events – only an untimely death
One thing I need to promise: I ought to be out of this cave before my birthday, otherwise I will have admitted to my defeat. Reading for tomorrow: Mrs. Dalloway.
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