Bluets

Above all, I want to stop missing you.

I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine.

237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days.

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words

This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

232. Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you

That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things

It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simply no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed

Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.

It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.