Bastard Freedom: Chapter 2

Marie was at her desk, willfully embroiling her brain to the mental gymnastics only a mistress the caliber of metaphysics can demand. As such, as with all writing, she was grappling with goodbye. 

Farewell, she writes, is a schizophrenic word and concept, for in its very utterance there is a different topography instituted, one of possibilities of future happenings without you, but simultaneously an evocation of a spirit of a withness that accompanies every wish in the very act of severing this withness.

It is as such a bastard of a word, one which by all rights should have no rights at all to a future, good- or ill-wished. By all demands it should be a death, but it is stubborn in its persistence, in its non-death: fare well, I will not be with you, but let no harm befall you while I stay gone.

God, she is so full of it. She is so - 

Doot. 

We're at the karaoke, baby. A message from Joseph forces her to come back from where the stars were pulling her hair. I'm going to sing Forever Love by Gary Barlow for you.

God, this man. After a week since the interview, they were acting as though they were lovers. He had told her about karaoke, of course, and, seeing that she had time to herself, set to writing. It's mutual masturbation, really, for the both of them. He had also told her about Peter, who is currently singing, in his Western European accent, an American song that just wouldn't bend to his tongue. The audience, apparently, were all scared of him: they went wild after every performance, asking for encores, giving him beer. 

I clap the loudest, Joseph further writes, a caveman acknowledging the presence of a mastodon. 

He couldn't decide whether to worship it or kill it, poor thing, Marie thought.

She replies very briefly, uncharacteristic of her, given that she is a pedant to the core and a metaphysician to boot. She needs to work, and read, and write. The stars were still not done pulling her hair; and a mere mortal, no matter how fascinating, could never exert that gravitational pull. 

Fuck, though. He was a right bastard, and the metaphysics pulling her hair was none other than stories he wrote. She still couldn't decide whether to see the man underneath the powerful riptide of his writing, knowing that to do so would be hot, dangerous, and deserving of nothing but farewells.

Well, shit. She realized she was starting to feel things, as she has been off her BPD medication for a week. She was starting to care, goddamnit, and, because it was so slow and glacial, not like the orgasmic pull of the stars, she was scared. 

Planets that take her out of orbit do not frighten her: she has read all of Derrida, after all. What frightens her is Joseph, if she was going to be honest with her own clitoris, since his presence and word was as insidious as this ghost of a  goodbye in Forever Love: "For how can I reason with the reason I'm a man?"