Impossible closeness
melancholy, madness, charms
Hi, thanks for being here, especially everyone who is new here. This will be the last public essay of 2022! If you haven’t heard, I’m running a discount on yearly/monthly subscriptions. There is still time to subscribe and save. You can do that below:
+
Despite the rain, I walk down Houston on Thursday night because I would miss New York. I’ll leave in two days. Twelve days is enough time for everything and nothing to change. Nothing and everything will be intact when I come back. I step into a puddle. My boots don’t get soaked through. New York in the rain, one of those clichés. But I love it. On the train, I think to myself, I love New York in the rain. I love clichés because they keep the idea alive. The rain washes the trash down to the drains. Bikers and taxis speed and splash those too close on the sidewalk. I don’t mind. I’m looking for Christmas lights. Tangles of LEDs around fire escapes. I want to see something that will make me miss New York. I stop on First Avenue at the pizza counter a few stores down from Lucien. Karlie Kloss walks past with someone who is definitely not Joshua Kushner as I shove a too-hot regular slice into my mouth. This I won’t necessarily miss.
New York at Christmas, it turns out, is just like New York at any time of the year. I walk to a store on Avenue B to buy Rin Quin Quin for my parents. The man at the cash register remembered me from my phone call earlier that day. We talk briefly about the liqueur, its difficulty to find. Someone from Georgia called asking for it. I wonder if he will remember me when I inevitably return a year from now to buy the same thing. I like the idea of a continuous present, my friend says. He means a gift that you give every year. But I like the double meaning, I want the continuity.
+
Mitch says, a person’s charm is often their madness. This is meant to make me feel better. It does a little. Then, he says, can’t wait for this to appear in the Substack. We all laugh, I would protest but it’s probably true. Both things. I tend to think of my madness in relation to other people—do they think I’m crazy? Is it obvious to them how insane I think I am? Never have I thought my madness would be the thing that endears me to someone else rather than repel them. The thought is comforting, even if I can’t believe it fully at this moment. I wipe the tears that have been sitting in my eyes for the last hour and drink my martini.
+
It’s warm in my friend’s apartment. I wake up there one morning following another night of little sleep. A week of bad sleeping. A year of bad sleeping, really. It’s funny how when you sleep poorly you say, I haven’t been sleeping, as if your body could suddenly function totally without it. Lately I know in part it’s my melancholy that has been keeping me awake.
In college during a months-long bout of insomnia, I read “Sleep” from Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. I read it during the holiday break, forcing my eyes to get tired from the pages rather than blue light. I imagined becoming the main character then. She doesn’t sleep for seventeen days, then stops altogether. Miracle and horror. This morning I imagine becoming the main character again as I look for my things in gray washed light. Moving quietly through someone else’s apartment while they’re still sleeping is a skill I’ve acquired in the last few months. I feel like maybe I should resign myself to her fate—I mean to write fate, but it autocorrects to fatigue.
From my friend’s window, the soaked decorations hanging over Myrtle look like they’re beginning to droop. I’d hoped to see the first snow before leaving. The others wake up. We’re looking at each other like we have to figure everything out. There’s work to do. Bagels, the trains, eight hours of work before the office closes for winter break. But first we push through the mist that hangs all over Seneca Avenue, the edgy leftovers of sleep slipping away from us. I pass one friend coffee through the window, my fingers stuck with cold. I look at the smoke of their breath coming out in contrast to the warm car. I hear, see you later. And I will.
+
Charms: disappearing. So much communication. No communication at all. Being a little annoying. Discomfort in the body made obvious by discussing the body over and over. Drinking too much and becoming affectionate. Avoidance, then rushing back. Meanness. Mischief. Way too attached. Confusing. A little antagonistic. Arrogant. Unsatisfied. Overly sentimental. Entirely unsentimental. Wanting, always wanting.
+
This can’t be charming, though, the way I gut myself. Stay open, I’m told. I do. I hurt my own feelings before others have the chance to. Freud is shaking his head. He’s seen it all before. The melancholic hurts themselves in order to not hurt the beloved. Despite wanting someone else to hurt. The melancholic becomes the wound. Misplaced anger. I have such a problem with anger. I don’t want to be mad, and I don’t want anyone to be mad at me. Both are impossible to avoid, yet I’d rather hurt if that meant someone else not. The melancholic who won’t stop self-sabotaging. The torment, all self-induced. Oversharing and leaking out. Freud: the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound.
I’ve always picked at scabs. I pick at the open wound of my own melancholy. I can’t keep my mouth shut for long enough to just enjoy the amorphousness. Gaby says what else would I write these essays about? Then adds how I have a good sense of self-preservation. I’m not so sure. I ask people if it’s ok that I use their names in my essays. I apologize when people joke about appearing in the Substack. It’s flattering is usually the response, but still I worry. Don’t say sorry. Here I do it again.
+
There’s always someone else wanting to go somewhere. Passed around friends like a cigarette between social smokers only. When my nights fragment, I feel my own madness, my own desire for more, splitting me into pieces.
+
I’m trying to not live in ambiguity, but as soon as I don’t, I wish for it back. I look for solace in Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, but it takes Maddie sending Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” to get through to me. The object’s been lost, the ego disattached and wounded. Yes, it’s me. Some friends tell me it’s better than the alternative, which was to continue to live in confusion and exist in a reality that wasn’t a reality at all. The danger that arises to someone when a love object is “lost”—through death, or betrayal, or disappointment—is not primarily the loss of that particular person or institution or ideal; the danger is to the person’s sense of himself, which depends on his sense of an ongoing internal attachment to his loved object.
I sit near the tennis courts in my hometown after a run, listening to music I listened to in high school. Nothing and everything changes. I think of all the objects I’ve tried to make real and failed. I told my friend I was afraid to lose the fantasy when she asked. Libras and their fictions lol, she replied. The thing about chasing after melancholy is that the self-torment gets boring after a while. I’m still trying to learn this.
+
Madness, which Freud calls mania, is the flip side of melancholy. I’ve never had a name for this edgy energy that runs through me after a loss of any kind. An almost mischievous resurgence of spirit when the melancholy ends. The energy that lasts until I’ve found a new fixation. I like the madness, because for once, it can make me believe that nothing I do could possibly be too much. In fact, I can only do too little. Libidinal and foolish, but freer than usual. (I read: Sometimes you have to follow your heart. Even if that’s brought me pain. It’s also kept me lucky. And free.) Grand declarations in the rain. Out of breath sending voice notes on the way to a party. A run across the bridge that cuts through you. Expensive breakfast in the early morning light. Another night awake until three or four. Walking around lower Manhattan in the same clothes as the day before. Having the second cigarette of your life because fuck it.
You could always lose, a friend tells me, that’s the point. When you do, you can’t just let yourself attach ravenously to the first thing that moves into your line of sight. This is what I tell myself.
+
What is your deepest, darkest fear? I ask people at a party. My party trick is to do this: ask what someone tells me is too personal of questions for cocktail hour. At this party, people are game. The answers vary from phobias to fears of loss. Someone asks me the question back. I say I’m afraid that we can never be quite as close to people as we want to be. I want impossible closeness. When we see inside another person for a second, we believe in the continuity between ourselves and them. Even though we are naturally discontinuous (or so says, Bataille), we want to be a whole rather than parts. Until morning, reality, something breaks the closeness, for a second you believe in the possibility of wholeness. It’s this quality that’s addictive, bringing us back again to try love even when we’ve been kicked like a little dog. I want to be pulled under until I can’t see the ring of light on the water’s surface. Just out of reach isn’t close enough. Charming and mad that there is always so much more than what I can have. Even when I say—as I did after I lost my cat—I can’t do this ever again, I know I will.
Another person can never know how much you’ve lost on your way to them. I know this is also true. Being close to another person makes you lose no matter how hard you try not to.
+
Almost six months here. Mitchell makes fun of me for saying I’m sad to be away from the city at the six month mark. Were you planning to celebrate? Embarrassed, no, maybe when it’s a year. Later he says we have to get out of the city. Forever? No, just for the break.
Driving out of the city, I wonder how much I’ll remember what happened in the six months I’ve been here, six months from now. I will remember, but the focus will be less sharp. I’m afraid to forget everything I’ve seen in a day, but I try to forget the hard edges. Only the softnesses I keep though I fail. Often the parts I want to remember most—when I wasn’t alone–I can barely remember at all. As we drive over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the light is already waning. Sunset is in two hours even though it is the middle of the afternoon.
I can’t even see the skyline in the rearview. I wanted to. It’s an idea I had of us leaving. The last glance like two runaways in a road movie. The season finale to the worst show ever. A turning point. I look for it, then give up and keep my eyes on the road.
