Maktub

It has been some years now. I do not think of you anymore, and only recently has removed every photo of you from my computer. Every once in a while, I would suddenly feel, what it has been like to hold you in my arms again – but that is not exactly thinking, nor is it even remembering. It is a physical sensation, an imprint of the past that has been left in my body, and I have no control over it. These moments come less often now, and for the most part it seems as though things have begun to change for me. I no longer wish to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said, that I am glad to be alive. But at least, I do not resent it. I am alive and the stubbornness of this fact has little by little begins to fascinate me – as if I manage to outlive myself, as if I were somehow living a posthumous life. I do not sleep with the lamp on anymore, and for many months now I have not remembered any of my dreams.

I no longer accept any invitations and avoid most of my friends, all of whom profess themselves anxious to see me, perhaps they are, but I can anticipate the conversation, the avoidance of a certain subject. And I feel protective of their naïve kindness, far more protective of them, than of myself.

In any event, I am scarcely aware of hurt, only of shock. This has a curious effect on me. I become polite and humble, searching people’s faces for the assurance I can no longer find in myself. When I look in the mirror, I see that my expression is one of pleading. If I live at all, in these months, I live automatically, eating without hunger to combat fatigue, exercising in order to afford myself some vestige of healthy activity. There is one change: I sleep a lot. I become a sleeper of heroic duration and consistency. In the early evening, I think of my bed with longing but wait until suitable hour before I permit myself to pull off the coverlet with relief. During weekend, I camp inside my room permanently, sometimes spending time outside only to use up the time before I can decently go to bed. Sleep is what I most want and crave. It seems to be the only need I will ever have again. Sometimes before going to sleep, you will enter my mind even if your life has excluded me for an appreciable time which I accept, however regretfully. I tell myself over and over again that our parting is inevitable. I go through this reasoning every night. Then I enter sleep as others enter religion.

In time, I regard the whole tragedy objectively and is successful in dismissing it from my mind for a good part of every day. What remain of it is incorporated in my loneliness, the one contingent upon the other. Because of the part I played, I am condemned to go through the world uncomforted, and because I accept this the burden remain oddly manageable, so manageable that I think few people are aware of its existence, whereas to me it is a physical accompaniment, a doppelganger, and the price it exacts, or the one that I volunteer, is a form of celibacy, interrupt only briefly from time to time by a transitory impression of closeness which do not survive than a night or two.

I have no one. I am, despite my many friends, to all intents and purposes, unsupported, or rather deprived of primitive parental and siblings’ support that one craves in the time of loneliness. Even though it bothers me greatly, I feel sometimes my self-communing is so intense that it is an effort to spend many hours in company.

My past experiences now appear to me as one vast divagation, a series of inevitable mistakes. Or maybe these mistakes are there to stop me from repeating them in the future. But usually too little information is known at the outset, especially when other’s do one thinking for one. I have simply failed, as others no doubt fail, when the fledgling judgement proves inadequate to the trials one encounters.