#34

On yearning, feverishly

I haunt thee, babe, dead of nite, candelabra burning brite, pining for a love I’ll never be blessed with. Whispering winds encompass the dark, and I fear that I have gone too far.

In the pits of December, angel, soft and gleaming, I cannot escape this listless feeling - vast, vapid and hollow. I’ve scrawled, I’m sure, in love notes to thee over these near-three years – hot, salty tears spilling into ink – of loneliness. Not with thought or foresight, but pure, intrinsic feeling. Loneliness, it seems, strikes like an iron and scolds my heart, hard and sharp, as I write to you once again from purgatory.

Colette Emmanuelle as Nancy in The Devil's Nightmare (1971) dir. Jean Brismée.

I’ve never felt comfortable being alone - content and contemplative as many of my friends feel. I can never seem to cease this yearning of mine. Longing for a hand to hold, a body by-my-side from midnite into morning. As of late, I’ve done my utmost to remedy this loss with, of course, cinema. Garland’s wounded croon emanates through the room into the smallest of hours, head turned to a distant corner, out of shot. As the curtains draw to their inevitable close, red velveteen drapes lapping the dust-covered stage, that untimely dread returns to me in one, near-fatal wave. I can’t do this anymore, she pleads. And so, a second film begins, and then a third, until I inevitably drift off.

And I wake up alone
And I wake up alone
And I wake up alone
And I wake up alone

Upon this journey of latent loneliness, I’ve sat solitary – weeping – and have now feverishly seen the following: Rear Window, Niagara, Some Like It Hot, All That Heaven Allows, Meet Me in St. Louis, Funny Girl, and The Odd Couple, the latter of which sees a suicidal Jack Lemmon come to terms with the untimely breakdown of his marriage. Walter Matthau sits, cigar-in-hand, nonchalantly shuffling a deck of cards.

Diana Ross and The Supremes performing Where Did Our Love Go? in T.A.M.I. Show (1964) dir. Steve Binder.

As I sit and reflect upon my practice over the last seven years, I feel an unnerving want-and-need to return to that old self. Manic, sexed, incensed, impassioned. Imbued by powder pink and red velvet, of course. I think about, historically, how I’ve dealt with this unnerving yearning, that need to need a body. I recall a performance I know you’ll never find, reader, in which I sit before an audience and consume an entire bottle of wine, dressed head-to-toe in lingerie. The Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go uncomfortably blares through the speaker system. I've got this burning, burning, yearning feeling inside me / Oh, deep inside me and it hurts so bad.

I stand outside, and retch on the steps of the art school. A tutor lifts me up and takes me home.

I yearn for affection, attention and adoration, and I can never successfully satiate that desire. One message becomes ten and, struck-through-the-heart, I’m suffering again. I sit across from a stranger who tells me that she’s proud of me, and I almost can’t bear to hear it. “You should have never been left alone”, she says. I look ahead blankly, eyes-welling-up. I find I often pine for things I cannot have. I remember the professor I used to pester incessantly, ascending three flights of stairs to hear about his day, his week, his month, his year. I remember thinking when is it going to happen, and it never did.

I read my earlier writing, dead-and-buried, before the grief, of distrusting figures in the dark, and I long to be foul again.

Marilyn Monroe as Rose Loomis in Niagara (1953) dir. Henry Hathaway.

When missing somebody you once loved, an unending urge presents itself: to trawl through every photograph, every video, and every message. It’s only then, dear reader, that you recall all the troubling things you’d set aside. Becoming the other, she grins.

Last seen today at 16:25

I see her weekly. When I saw her last, she asked “…and what did she need?” I pause for an inordinately long time, eyes hyper-focused on a cobwebbed corner of the room. I examine the grain within the woodwork, emboldened by the light cast by a lampshade. “Attention”, I struggle to stifle. She nods knowingly, silently. Sitting and staring into that digital mirror, in the rotten hovel that has now become my bedroom, reader, I aimlessly refresh, awaiting a reply. It doesn’t come. I push away all ideation, and pull my laptop closer, its warmth substituting the body I want.

‘Watch [insert movie] free online’.

Until the New Year, angel.