My Own Tangle of Thorns

desire is human, human is desire

Time is transcended, dangling from a wooden bar, as a piece of string. White, slightly frayed at the end, slowly coming apart with every second. It is completely still apart from when it is being blown every so softly by a faint wind, or perhaps my breathe as I stare at it. It is transcended. Transcended in time, which is also what it is.

This is how life feels. Time is passing but life is not happening. Life is happening in a sort of fiction – one could mistake the string for moving, but in reality it is the background of time – uncontrollable forces, unseeable too – and we trick ourselves into thinking that it moves by itself. But when we hold our breathe, it stops moving. The string is still, as life is still. I am still. There is a distance.

This is the same distance I feel when I stare at the mirror. It is not me, but rather a fiction of me, something I choose to see. You have to choose to look at a mirror, or you would choose not to, like you would choose not to see yourself. I wonder if the fiction of me is similar to the real me, which you see. Or at least another fiction of me. There is never only one, of anyone. The truest versions of ourselves, I think, is when we lie with someone after sex. I have never experienced the same kind of raw vulnerability as I do in these moments. I am naked. I am with you. I am not next to you. I am not near you. I am with you. With all of you.

I am with you in the most raw way. I wish I could be this vulnerable all the time – brushing with danger, or perhaps feeling, though perhaps these are the same, is the closest humans come to desire. Without desire we are not human. Animals fuck other animals for survival. We fuck each other for solace, out of desire for such. Desire is human, human is desire.