Withdrawal Symptoms
A moment after you left. Anxiety. Night. A light bulb—civilization’s crowning achievement—behind the door. This memory of you that barely grazes the edge of my skin vanishes. Light that serves to chase away my solitude. Your presence, summoned by my mind, finds no home in the certainty that when I turn off the bulb, my eyes keep bouncing across circles and lines, hexagons too, and back to circles again. Will you be there? I close my eyes to imagine your presence over my life once more. To stop missing you, invaded and expressive of this mad thirst that floods my body; that your life satisfies to the precise point where the sweetest dependency is maintained: bodily dipsomania. I’m sure you suffer from it too.
I try to invent a ritual—as many as I can, within my moral boundaries—to summon sleep instantly, where you will surely accompany me, placid and happy. Now that this decreed confinement in these voluntary prisons we call cities prevents me from leaving this house, and inside it, nothing exists. Frozen at this point where together we felt ready to take a step forward, despite the demands of illusory wellbeing: the conquest of solitude. I walk to finish settling into this barely-occupied dwelling, though nothing in its corners triggers a memory of you. All these unknown things, all these strangers remind me of you—a vicious circle of impatience against desire manifesting in your absence.
An overdose of water would surely be impertinent. I’ve decided to return to my minimal confinement, my personal cell. Now I feel that by reducing the confinement, my emotions might shrink too, and perhaps with this calm I achieve, I can barely dream while I turn off the electric light and return to this new bed with our old blankets. I knew from the first step it wouldn’t work—the natural resistance to administering my body through planned, prescribed actions no longer functions. That’s what I’ve done.
Once again, between the bed and civilization, my gaze travels across what my emotion contains. Emptiness around this bed, barely to be occupied, barely occupied by the bed, the blankets, and us. You appear before me, enclosed in an emptiness that leaves no room and has no power for my desire and yours to unite our bodies through desire, desire through our bodies, thought made into sensitive body—fragility that varnishes our skin so that a caress could dissolve the house of cards it contains. At that point where my memory is your desire to be with me. Night, moon, the right spell, and we’ll be together in the act. Emptiness that has room for your presence. Everything is ready.
At the crossroads between circle and spiral, I decide to turn off the bulb, and in dreams I feel you enter the bed. I turn. Kiss and embrace, Poetry.
