Woman Without Her Man Is Nothing
We have trouble communicating sometimes, we forget to tell each other things, sometimes on purpose. People never seem to know which of us they are talking to, we are always being mistaken for one another. We try to pose as a single person when buying movie tickets or renting an apartment. But all of life is a fun adventure, with each other in our side.
Nobody ever wanted to be alone. We weren't born that way. We weren't conceived that way. No way would we want to die that way. And yet coffins are built for one. Incredible. As you age, furniture and rooms shrink to exclude multiple occupants. Bathroom doors shut and lock, you learn to sit in your own seat, and when, in the middle of the night, the thunderstorms and nightmares arrive, you sweat them out on your own. You face the darkness and watch as your invisible friends are eaten by monsters.
The universe – literally, everything – began as a singularity – literally one thing. And according to predictions it will close again like an accordion and ts whole spew of glowing matter will become one dot again. In retrograde motion, species proliferate from a single species, but every being crawls its way out of an embryonic soup, packed with brothers and sisters, to die alone. Birth pluralizes, death singulates. Democracy, in gathering the collective will of its cells into the semblance of an entity, is a sort of death.
He and she had become two yolks in an egg, an egg on a bumpy ride. Striving to become a singularity, but repelled, an eccentric orbit resulted, a hazardous oscillation.
"I am not ready for a relationship," she tells him. He would like to get points just for pointing out the apparent paradox compressed into her telling him, after 6.5 years of relationship, that she is not yet ready to begin. But no points are available. He feels a particular sense of being insulted: his intelligence. How is that not a kissoff? he wonders. This is starting to feel like dating Ari Fleisher. "America is not ready for a war in Iraq." He tells his girlfriend's girlfriend that his girlfriend is her girlfriend, and that this is not normal. He's not saying its bad, he's just trying to get points for having somehow pointed out that it is difficult. Well, and he craves his girlfriend, surely so does his girlfriend. He is so lustful he almost wants to drink her blood. Nowhere in this can he find a selfless, loving impulse.
The next day they wake up in bed together, bathed in sunlight. Bliss. They lie in their arms. They are finally plural, together forever.
They drive home and enjoy one another’s company.
It is expensive, but it is the only way, he thinks, to cure his loneliness. He speaks earnestly to the doctor, as she studies his testicles. "I wanted to have my personality amputated, but they can't do that except through television. I was always destined to not be alone." "So were you wanting to be hermaphroditic, then?" "No, I want a complete pluralization. I want to be us." "Well, we have three options: Meiosis, splitting, and budding." "Meiosis? Would I be able to carry a child to term?" "Possibly. But it wouldn't be a total pluralization, genetic mixing would occur." "I think I'd like to try splitting. Is it painful?" "The first time. We have amoeba capsules you can take, to trigger reproduction."
They -- he, his girlfriend, her girlfirend, her boyfriends, one of their wives, perhaps a histrionic ex, are snarled in a web of emotional need.
His girlfriend’s girlfriend replies that there is a heterosexual conspiracy capable of real violence, that "Family Values" are the right wing catchphrase for “you may no longer rely on the social services of the state for your basic survival.” It is heterosexist, racist, speciesist, and even planetalist. Identity hinges on income and progeny, a genetic project and the funding to realize it. Where am I?=Where am I working?
Who am I?=Who am I doing?
He doesn't buy his girlfriend’s girlfriend’s theory, because he's waiting for the conspiracy to help him out on this. After all the propagandistic love letters he has written to advance, in his way, the conspiracy's paradigm, the conspiracy owes it to him to step in and marry him to her.
That last addiction: your partner. Because when autumn begins its terribly beautiful requiem of color, which of us can stare down into that skinny casket and feel a sense of purpose? It's tempting to believe in the truth of reality, but language can always help us dissociate ourselves from even our most irreducible urges. In a society that lies, that implies heavily that its people are not basically carnal, can an intense sexual obsession be a basic truth, rather than a depravity? No. He is a pervert. He is sexually attracted to women.
He has received a large inheritance. This ended his relationship. His having quit drugs and alcohol had started the trouble, which escalated when his bookstore started to do well, but the inheritance was the last straw. She could no longer put up with his health, his stable moods, the general pleasure and ease of their life together. Even the idea that excited him irritated her. He was expanding his online bookstore to sell writers and have them sent to customers, to hang around their homes and be interesting, to read aloud from their work so the consumers could rest their eyes.
Were people in couples singular or plural, or did it depend on the couple? They committed a sort of meiosis and became a single entity with aspects of the two that had formed it and unpredictable aspects as well: recessive traits that emerged. Two outgoing people become insular together. Or vice-versa. Was the undoing of this process a pluralization or singularization?
She will have her cake and eat it slowly. He has been had and eaten, but, he tells himself, hey, at least I’m cake. He could not settle for being less than the most important person, and wasn’t sure what he thought about his narcissistic insistence. He didn’t think he wanted to add anybody to the two of them just then. But he was delusional: there had been more than two of them for a long time, with his (false) impression of her (as being in love with him), him as he saw himself, vice versa vice versa. Now by telling him she might be losing interest in the relationship, but leaving room for doubt, she had created a schizophrenia. He was simultaneously single and not single. Like the alcoholic must always be drinking or not drinking, struggling to drink, or struggling not to drink, in any given moment, and each course of action implies the other. No he was single and plural at the same time, which must have made at least three of him.
It is clear from her evasive language that she expects to expeller-press his heart. A lot of hearts are broken through the use of metals, chemicals, and high temperatures, industrial processes that break larger quantities of hearts more efficiently. But she seems to know that human heart oil, one of nature’s most potent sources of love, is damaged at high temperatures. She is going to press his heart mechanically, using inert metals, in a vacuum or in an oxygen free-environment of inert gases, because oxidation can make love go rancid. She will also keep the temperature at or below 5 degrees Celsius to prevent damage to the fragile chemical structure of his heart oil. She will bottle the thick mysteriously dark amber fluid in chemically stable opaque plastic and keep it frozen or refrigerated. The love this fluid will give her will keep her energetic for her next ten lovers.
I am singular. There is no longer an other, a partner. I can be counted only once, and then there is nothing left to count.
2018