metaphysics of longing

Her tongue was blue again in the morning when she woke up.  It hadn’t happened like that for a very long time, but she certainly felt that way long enough, and that’s part of what made it so interesting to her.  She felt it without the evidence, and suddenly, here it was, her blue tongue.

Her blue tongue would not convince him, though, so it wasn’t spectacular evidence.  This would become like a story, this is like a story.

And it should be like this:

In the morning, her head feels a little like a Tupperware something, one of those containers that is tightly sealed shut, and her head is a container for words.  In the morning, she feels like her head is sealed shut, full of words, and they echo to the point of just almost being there where she can hear them, but not quite there, so she is stuck going through most of a day on the verge of understanding something.  Something that’s said either by her or to her or through her.  There was a time, not too long ago, when someone was saying for her, and sometimes it was very pleasant and most of the time it was very harmful and hateful, and now it just strikes her as one of the things that people might do if you’re not careful. 

That narrator is in her head, she realizes, and asks it to leave.

Because it is supposed to be like this:

This was always supposed to be a story about iterations.  Who gets to speak, and speak for the first time, and who gets to come the first time and who gets to avoid all the repetition the first time so that the other one will have to be re-iterative and everything else that happens the second time.  So when he spoke for the first time it wasn’t exactly a pure thrill, there was always something else going on under the surface of things (a ridiculous statement, not because it is not true but because it is obvious and even more obvious than that even).  But it was also not so much of a thrill for him as he had hoped, because there is no first time, and they both knew that, and he was supposed to have whatever thrill there was from it being close enough to the first time, or rather, as close as either of them would get to that.  But it was so much an always already repetition, this speaking and all the power plays involved in that were already spoken and played out, and he could never quite explain how it was becoming clear to him that theories of repetition in language are really at their core theories about being in a body that comes back, and being in bodies that come back and repeat and leave and come back.

And with that came the underlying idea (again a ridiculous idea because there are too many underlying ideas for anything to single one out, they should all be random because they are all true anyway already) that when he spoke of her after or wrote her after that it was an attempt to capture that part of her that repeats, that comes back, and he would be jumping the gun, really, playing the next life out in a language game.  However, not but, but however,  if language makes us, then it could be very much the same thing, at least for him, and if it sounded true to her, then it would be like that for her, too, and that didn’t have to mean they were playing god.  The core of it was a sense of helplessness about missing each other and not knowing what else to do, not yet anyway, not at this moment anyway, not for awhile yet anyway.

So in the end it was also a language game, except, and maybe here because of that, the end was seeming much and much less like an end, but like a short pause, that he were paused and she were paused but their lives continued on anyway, which is not so much of a pause as nothing at all, time flowing forward in the way that it does and they were going forward with it, in a way together but not so very much together that they were waking up and saying things to each other about breakfast.  Neither of them ate breakfast, really, but it was more than that, it had to do with space.  Bodies not inhabiting the same space at the same moment, but being somewhere else, doing things to themselves and with other people, in a way that would suggest to anyone with an empirical sensibility that they were really not together at all but very much apart.

Which seemed to suggest that the end were really that, an end, and that was true and now this was true, except, there were exceptions.  He would continue to wake up at three in the morning and she would be there, and the same thing happened to her, and often enough that they would write each other to check the times and the places and they would match of course, and that made it all so metaphysical that it was also sad.  Because metaphysical means that they had to find places outside and above the physical plane, but still working within its structures, and that said to them that the physical plane was, at the very least, an issue, and on some days it was an unbearable prison, and notions of next lives would not make it easier, but could make it much worse, because it could be said to resemble something like waiting. 

All lovers wait.  If they were waiting, then they were lovers, too, but no different than anyone else, just lovers who wait, but in a slightly different way, and on bad days the differences were negligible, and on most days the differences were the honey on the tongue that made them both able to open their mouths to the mouth of the world and speak back.  Prayer.  Speaking back to the speaking world is prayer, and only time would play the part of the answer, so in between waiting there was prayer and they got so lost in prayers that the waiting didn’t matter any more.