Education as formative. Hours and days and years in institutions; lots of long hours per day and not much aside from that. Education. Inhibition. How they work. Together. One at the root of the other. Being afraid, fearing. And, at the same time, wanting to steal your friend’s boyfriend. Wanting to tempt him with a fruit—from which tree? On the playground—of which school? One of those with the fruits like cotton that comes in a double shell that closes over itself. The silk floss tree? Is that silk floss fruit? Or what is it? Is it the fruit of the green silk floss’s pink flower and spikes? From one of those two-story schools with the hundred-percent-cement play area, perfect for knees. And fear, after. Fear of the teacher, above all, of authority. Fear of them kicking you out? Of them calling you out? Pulling you aside? Getting set apart? Maybe most of all that they will call you out on it. A past of insolence, an initial becoming insolent. I’ll do what I want to do, I’ll do what I want to do, I’ll do what I want to do. A first act of insolence or challenge to authority or lack of recognition of hierarchies, punishments with switches. By force: force of words, of order. Threats. Of what? With what? When they say: what you’re doing isn’t right. Not only that, but also: it’s wrong. When who knows what—in a human being—is actually wrong.
Like in that article about the big serial killers, vicious, greedy murderers. One of the examples was Ted Bundy, a very smiley person, suntanned, such a go-getter; another was that old couple who killed children in England. What were their names? Point being, in the article there were these specialists who said how there’s a certain grade of wrongness that will not fit into any psychological framework, that is of some other order, unclassifiable: pure wrong. Unadulterated wrongdoing. It was kind of like they were freaking out about it a little bit, these psychologists; they didn’t even want to get into religion or morality, which would lead nowhere. They talked about psychopaths, some who’d end up killing, others not, and of course some of those serial killers are not even psychopaths. And there was a kind of scale they’d developed that went from one to twenty-one in order of severity to calibrate the degree of cruelty shown by the killer to the victims. After that I wondered how psychology positions—where, how—death itself, a person’s own death, I mean. One’s own death. What place it holds in the brain, in the mind. A person dying for him- or herself, an intransitive. The reflex of a person’s death, the reflexive act of dying, dying as reflex. Dying is therefore reflexive. I guess that’s something.
I mean. The ABCs of my psychology, my building blocks. Yesterday I saw Juli’s mom with a kid, with a baby, and today I wake up overwhelmed by him, because of him, because of dreaming him, exhaustively and at length. Dreaming seeing him, dreaming him talking, me still going through that same old awful thing of not being able and not wanting to simply let him go, and at the same time not wanting to stay with him. Or not being able to. I don’t know. The with-or-without-you thing, that whole thing, with or without you. Like Fanny, like Depardieu. That pit in your stomach, in your heart, that hole where nothing ever, nothing you can do is or ever will be enough. Ever. That sense of reduction, of absence. That’s what I felt, that pit, I felt it in my dream, having Juli there in front of me, and at the same time I was happy, I mean, a specific sense of happiness, so towards him, seeing him there, being face-to-face with him and knowing that I wasn’t going to shatter into a thousand pieces, at least not yet. That sensation too—that of my heart in my throat just from wanting to know, basically, if he’s okay, what he’s been up to. So in my dream we were talking, and he was telling me that he had kids and a wife or I don’t know if he was saying that, but the feeling was that he was with someone, and that there was something that wasn’t possible anymore for the two of us, that was it, impossibility, and, nonetheless, the undeniability of that which does remain, of what we do still feel, that chemistry, that charge, that need. It’s like I could ingest, devour him in those moments, so he would stay inside me forever. Or have him kill me, I also think that, I think that that could happen, and it’s almost like I want it to happen, like I’m expecting it to happen, for him to kill me. If I close my eyes or rest my head on my arms on the table, and he smoothes my hair, I think or I feel that in that moment he could crush my head in one fell swoop, kick me directly in the head and kill me, but I don’t open my eyes, I just stay there with my eyes shut, not feeling fear, only resignation, surrendering to that, surrendering to him, to his capacity to crush me. The death drive, I guess, and I guess it always felt like that with him, that death drive. Like being at the midpoint between wanting to avoid and needing to go ahead. Knowing, hearing that it would be good/would be better to get out of it, and nonetheless not being able to, not really, not being able to escape, and going going going on and on and on, as though magnetized, by something. Maybe the kid’s not his, maybe Susi was watching some other kid, why would it have to be her grandchild? Yesterday I didn’t have the guts to ask your parents any questions over dinner, I kept feeling so shocked about that baby that I didn’t want to talk about it at all, I’m sure it’s his, that he’s the father, and I need to kind of get used to the idea before it gets confirmed for me, I need to be able to handle the confirmation in a stoic manner, when it’s given. Right now I’m a wreck, I’m not sure why it’s killing me this way, obviously it was always there within the realm of the possible. I mean: he isn’t and wasn’t a part of my life anymore, even if he was before, and he’s free to do whatever he wants, and I always wanted him to do well, to be happy, or maybe not happy because maybe that’s too much to ask, but I did want him to get to some sort of stability, I guess, at least an emotional one. But now it’s hell for me that he has that, it makes me angry or sad that I couldn’t give it to him, and worse, still, that he’s been able to find it with someone else. Fundamentally, I can’t tolerate the idea that he’s had children with another person, another girl, another woman. The idea that there could be little hims in the world, and that they would have nothing to do with me, is painful, I don’t know why, or I don’t know why it’s so bad, I guess I hadn’t ever really imagined it, I’d always assumed he’d be kind of lost in the world, trying to reconstruct his life, and now it turns out that he didn’t waste any time at all, didn’t waste a single second, and obviously he wouldn’t have been on his own for this whole time, with his charisma, which you’ve got to give him. The son of a bitch is enchanting. Ali watches me, eyes wide, in that cat’s pose that’s somewhere in between complete surprise and watching like a hawk and beholding the face of a corpse. I find it funny when she looks at me like that: I hold her gaze, try to replicate her bewildered face, and for a while we just stare at each other. I wonder if she’s trying to convey something to me that I can’t quite understand,