#1

It used to be ... 

It used to be that I thought I loved and cared for him, so his prolonged absence led me to search for the reasons he was no longer there. But all the searching led me in circles; neither he, nor the reasons for his absence were there to be found. All that was there, was an emptiness; not an absence, but an endless well of nothingness that cloaked me in a misery that lingered for an unexpectedly long time. At times I thought that I would never shake it; even after the ruminations had ceased.

So I was truly surprised when after many years he suddenly made contact again. Both his disappearance and his reappearance confused me equally. I had no way of rationalising either. What struck me, however, was the familiarity with which he took up relations again, as though he had never been gone at all. 

And so, we took up communications, and for a while I felt relieved, accepted once again.

We spoke and exchanged thoughts, but I had a feeling that nothing I said mattered. It simply did not penetrate; an invisible, spectral fabric lay between us. It was porous, but unidirectional. The things I said settled upon it, and became symbols for other things which he understood but I did not. 

It confused me at first, but I did not relent. I felt as though it were my duty to persist. But he saw everything through the prism of his own primacy, so we were not really friends. He knew nothing of my struggles and cared even less for them. All I could ever hope to be was an apparition mirrored within his psychosis. His self had become all-pervasive, and it had rendered him insane. There could be no friendship here as there was only one person. For a friendship to exist and thrive there needed to be two. There needed to be a “we”.

So I cut myself away, as I would only ever be a cancer to him; a tumour in and of his own being. Indeed, it may be that my presence was suffocating him, and in order for him to grow healthy again the attachment had to be broken. And as for myself I came to resent being a bit-part; a growth of some other body, a caricature in his imagination.

The moments in time that had joined us no longer existed. They had passed, and could not be reclaimed. All attempts to reclaim them produced only artifice and frustration. He was no longer there, and neither was I. We had decoupled and were now on different trajectories, existing in wholly different universes. We were unwanted appendages to each other, and I could not understand why he had sought me out again. Perhaps it was merely to remind himself – or to confirm to himself – that I had indeed once existed and was the reason for the cancer he carried. That the cancer was his, and his alone, was a notion that appeared to have no root in his vocabulary.

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