love, read, write

"Autobiography is a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause." 
– Paul de Man, Autobiography as Defacement

I am editing a twenty-minute clip of my late lunch at a park in Sydney, one of many videos I took while traveling alone in Australia. It is two weeks after the events in the video. I have not eaten dinner. It is one in the morning. Tomorrow is Monday. None of these facts occur to me. There is a longing that drives me through this physical limbo into a deep investigation of many hours of footage. Clip after clip after clip. Watching, rewatching. Starving.

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My working theory is that it was the mirror that made me into a ghost. Emphasis on the "working" – I'm still undecided whether I would describe my state of being as ghosthood, and also on how the mirror did the ghost thing. 

In the spirit of science, I have a couple of test scenarios that I believe would help me figure out what happened.

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if there is a god (not that there certainly is, but if for a moment we believed it), then maybe god is an elderly woman with kind wrinkles and a knowing smile, a familiar scent of home and nostalgia, a cup of tea between her hands. if there is a god, she is listening, observing, embracing. you’re speaking to her. you vomit out your life in front of her — full of shame, embarrassment, the occasional pride.

you are shrouded by self-pity these days. it’s getting dangerous, the amount of self-absorbed isolation you’re drowning in, indulgently, in the full glory of life’s terribleness. you are slowly isolating yourself from your friends, blindly hurting others through careless words that stem from insecurity. they’re small changes — barely noticeable, but with several months’ time, the world has shifted its tone towards you — it’s defensive, cautious. you’re something they are careful about. you feel a sense of loneliness waft up from the gaps in the flooring.

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