dried out

an involuntary meditation

On the fifth day, God said 'let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven,' and the seas and the skies teemed with living things and it was good. It is the fifth day, and I have not seen many living things. Well, perhaps I have, but I have not spoken to them, nor have I touched them, and it is only when something passes between us that I feel I have met something living.

My office flooded over the weekend, and, because I am the gay monkey they chain to the reception desk, I have been islanded to work alone on the premises. If Noah had two of every living thing to keep him company, then my Ark is five industrial dehumidifiers. They encircle me like a pentagram and they do not ever turn off for even a second and underneath the whirring sound of the fans I can hear a pulsing, relentless, grinding electronic hum set at that precise frequency I imagine the Santa Ana winds must emit when they drive you to psychosis. Sometimes it sounds like I am living in a defibrillator. At about the fifth hour, it starts to sound like it’s breathing.

If you have been waterboarded long enough, does salvation begin to feel like imprisonment? I don’t mean to be so dramatic as to imply I am being waterboarded when, at most, I am suffering a workplace inconvenience. Inconvenience prolonged indefinitely is its own kind of torture. I hear the whirring when I go home in the evening. It’s been five days of it now and I think I miss it when I’m away.

Sorcha told me she thinks talking is one of my ‘pillars of being.’ I don’t think she meant it to be backhanded, only delivered with that knowing smirk she uses to package both sincerity and ridicule such that it is difficult to parse where they separate, but I have been thinking about it a lot this week. Who do I become when I do not speak? I am in a strange time in my life, a strangeness which had felt beyond articulation long before the screams of drying equipment. I am afraid that being construed as a talker implies some structural narcissism which eclipses the humility of my listening. I never say much of importance. I only ever want to say enough to indent the negative space which pulls speech from others; preparing that pit of uncomfortable silence into which one must spill out their words. Love is an osmosis.

Today there are so many strange men around me. They are ripping up the carpet underneath my feet and drilling in the walls and it feels like an intrusion, even though I do not live here. Men, particularly when they are singularly focused on their work, do not seem to feel the palpable static of another person’s presence. I feel it wherever I go; I walk into rooms polite and apologetic, contorting myself to the margins of their private space, hypervigilant about how far their personhood reaches and where I might violate it. I may as well be a mannequin to this builder. Even mannequin implies something human-shaped, where I am something more like an inconvenient architectural feature, perhaps a bathroom door that does not close properly.

I went to a boys’ school, so I do not fear Men (I capitalise Men here to capture their distinct masculinity, unlike that of a faggot who fears Men), but I would be lying if I said I did not still feel the tension between us. I dislike that my smile is never fully met and that I must blink away from eye contact because its intensity might be misinterpreted. A man is picking up a heavy fan a couple of metres away from me and smirking at the neon condom display in the stairwell. I asked Francis once what makes him feel like a man, and he said it made him feel good about himself when Ricky asked to borrow a power drill. I think men walk a straight line into themselves. To be a man is to arrive at oneself and decide to stay, to inhabit himself as he might a house he has built with his own hands, and his getting there relies only on a clearing of the path. When the man picks up the fan his spine looks like steel and he does not second-guess himself in the reflection of the window. Power to me, then, is never something direct; it is a winding road through the dark in the Coromandel; it is sneaky and covert, a kind of snakecharming that schemes and tricks and disarms. I have not spoken properly in days and so I cannot level the playing field. I feel neutralised; I am a little bitch.

I have to say, little bitch probably describes it best. When I try to imagine what I look like lately I see Henry’s baby from Eraserhead. The same patheticism, the same raw meat, stripped of skin to expose the more hideous smallness which operates my more deluded egos. My Eraser-baby-self has little to do with this white noise prison, but it does seem strangely coincidental to feel as small in my life as I do at my work, as if this is the lesson I must be taught right now. The Anchorites used to wall themselves up in cells in the church to denounce the world, alienating themselves from experience so that they might meditate only on God; I think they chose it, but does anybody ever choose loneliness? I am walled up against my will, and perhaps this endless-buzz of the fan is no different from the Oms of a monastery. It is too loud to think, at least in that recursive loop of shame that most overthinking takes on. I think as I move, as reflex, eternally present.

I have not used many em dashes today, which is rather unlike me, but I suppose I am etching thoughts to the page automatically and there is no room for explication. The monks structure their silence around the violations of a ringing bell, or otherwise time might bleed into nothingness. Speech marks the duration it takes to produce. A conversation measures itself in the time it takes to have, and I think it is nice to know time is passing. Joanna Newsom sings love is not a symptom of time, but time is a symptom of love. Knowing something will end makes it alive.

The tradies have become their own liturgy to me, morning service and midnight mass. Jack arrives at 10am to test the moisture levels of each floor and promises me it might dry up tomorrow even though we both know it won’t, but he has a beautiful mullet and I wonder how he keeps his curls so hydrated so it’s okay. He asks me to unlock a door for him and time passes. Whenever he is late it feels as if the hours pool and stagnate, with only the metronome of a dehumidifier to stretch them out to infinity. The men exist as weather exists. They are as predictable as they are untouchable, passing through as rainfall might, marking the day as seasons would.

I went to a therapist for the first time in a while the other day, and she talked more than I did. When a voice is made redundant through inaction, phlegm rusts through the cords and creates its own deposits of sediment. I clear my throat every time I say a sentence and it sounds so unsure of itself that I feel I may as well have said nothing at all. I am not sure any snake would be particularly charmed by me now. I like how animated my therapist is, even if she is only telling me things I clearly already know. Sometimes people have to explain things to you to feel like they have something of value inside them, and listening is a clearer form of seeing.

I am not much of a crier, but the catharsis of sobbing seems to undo the tightly-wound tensions of the internal world, and what follows can only be described as a different quality of light; it imbues everything you look upon, the film lifted from fresh, dried-out eyes. The supermarket caught on fire the other day. I have never seen billows of smoke like that, how endless it seems, the dirtied clouds tapering into something more pure as they dissipate into the sky. How instant it must have been as one ember turns into that all-consuming blaze. How powerless it makes us feel, an enormity that we can never truly comprehend; I think it’s why everybody on the street starts talking to each other, an unconscious hand reaching out to say I am just flesh too. A businessman laughs as he says we might have to get lunch somewhere else. It was the 25th anniversary of this supermarket, and they were building a café. It seems silly to grieve the burning of a building, but everything makes me feel sentimental now. I catch the bus with the ladies who work at the deli and we always say Hello when we cross the street. I think talking is what saves us.

Flood, fire, winds. In his commentary on Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross says the soul must be purified in the furnace as gold in the crucible. The night of the senses, when we are stripped of our illusions of who we think we might be and face instead the grim reality of who we are, is a terribly lonely night. I’ve been calling it the acceptance of total loserdom. We walk through the valley of the shadow of our worst selves and meet the dweeb within. What remains is that terribly hideous little creature walking around in the Great Void of his own solitude, hands outstretched, hoping something might take pity and grab back. I guess patented Bypass Technology Phoenix dehumidifying machines are my crucible of a sort. I want to smell like asphalt after a storm.

My coworker is clairvoyant, a fact I knew when she was hired, but as with politics and religion, it seemed uncouth to ask about her relationship with the Other Side. She finally broached the subject as we discussed the flooding: Jupiter is moving into Cancer, she tells me, and with it comes a sense of urgency and speed. A lot is going to change. Change excites her, even when it seems destructive on the surface. She tells me she always avoids bringing up her gift because she does not wish to impose her beliefs on other people, but she had always felt that I would understand. I guess she has to say that because she’s clairvoyant, but she’s right, too. All speaking is really an imposition of will, to think anybody has anything worth saying at all. We impose ourselves regardless, and we listen too, because living is imposing and living is being imposed upon. ‘All real living is meeting,’ Buber writes in I and Thou. I want to meet everything.

Raf comes to the office today, I think it is the eighth day. Even God gave up on that one. I like how Raf’s bright orange gym bag feels like a cold plunge, some anomalous radiation against the drab greys and browns of a gutted-out building. It is the day after his birthday, and we have a lot to say to one another, or maybe not at all. In the letter I gave him for his birthday, I said I wanted to tell him everything. I also want to share the quiet with him.