Jolt Box

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had the effect on me which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence it could have come, this all powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. When did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?*

For a long time now I’ve wanted to tell the story of that winter in which I began by forbidding you to speak. I made music of your silent and foreboding body. Your leonine stature became my vain dream of life. I wanted you just close enough to absorb your sulky, circumfluent luster, its mystery crawling up my spine slowly, gaining momentum and eventually, rising furiously with a hot tight spark at its tip. That jab of intoxication I popped like a morsel when finally, through two beams in your eyes, your horror was directed at me -

It was summer by then, my hair was trimmed neatly, falling at my shoulders and tangling up into the wind as I made my way north on my bike. I saw you first, making loops into the intersection where we were both stopped. You looked back as if to say something to her, your girlfriend who was now right behind me. I was there in her place, my beguiling scent and gem-like glance, it took but a moment. I had beaten her to her place unexpectedly and swallowed you up into my aura, my poetry. My face round and plump and glittering with the light in my eyes, it reminded you of a cake on top of which a place has been kept for a morsel of blue sky. You looked at me in surprise and disgust and I received your gaze with a rush of choking glee. Both of us rushed forth and parted without an exchanged word.

It happened slowly, A little tap on [my] window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, like grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: I found something I wanted more then those shrill unconscious longings for you. A huge crevice opened up and in that space empty of you I could neatly situate the urges I had experienced again and again during our gruesome pact.

To release in words the burdensome version of you violently masquerading as my fuel. I speak, I rub my memory clean. Extinguish you who I spent months feeding off of.

You who were a solemn stock and when you snagged, where you snagged, I retreated, watching sap trail down your legs, your thighs, ribs. You, the fountain of danger to which I was most devout – the object of my shooting, rising, swiveling anxiety; the cold delirium blanketing my mind with soggy trash. I was always holding, keeping, shooting high as a kite and clinging to that memorized you that kept me gliding, cannibalizing, synchronizing you and you and you and you, my anxiety’s sweet crescendo ringing out so loudly through my perfect golden solitude. We had our mutual, volatile, criminal scopophilia; cheating or way through each minute, holding fast to a dangerous distraction that was purely aesthetic, purely instinctual, form without fracture, as animal as language went.


*Material in italics is taken from “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust (1871-1922)