Caress (after Roland Barthes)

1. There are several versions of this scene.
2. I hold my breath and begin again—I am able to hold this state of suspended animation for greater and greater lengths of time.
3. I am able to keep you ever present.
4. You sing an old Mariner’s song, that you learned from your father.
Your voice is like a comforting breeze.
5. This odd history of language.
6. I am compelled to reveal its injury here, in every act of speech.
7. We float a toy sailboat on Stowe Lake, Golden Gate Park.
8. A strange game. A strange place.
9. Inseparable from this text.
10. It is in the telling that I hold you close.
11. A crease in your brow, a grimace, the tapping of your fingers on the table.
12. I create a lexicon of you.
13. I am at a loss to describe its logic.
14. Even after all of this.
15. I am certain that I will not hear your voice again.
16. I go about my daily routine constantly aware of this fact.
17. Everything is distant; alien, remote.
18. There is no correspondence between what is said "here" and some "there"—some "outside."
19. Each word I write seems unambiguous and yet incomprehensible.
20. Everything is frozen, petrified—in suspended animation.
21. Everything has stopped.
22. I leaf through a book that you gave me, but imagine words that have nothing to do with those that I am reading and everything to do with the feel of the pages between my fingers.
23. Tenderness.
24. It is precisely this place where you are not that I begin and end this tale.
25. I am both mother and father to this creation, this child. How shall I
proceed?
26. You try to comfort me, to calm my anxiety, my fear of losing what you secretly know I have already lost.
27. A gift freely given.
28. I lift salt sea water to my lips.
29. Feel your words in my mouth.
30. I relive the moment again and again replacing you with your memory, unable to slow or speed up this procession of thoughts and images.
31. There is no outside of this scene, no safe vantage point from which to analyze its players, its plot, its message.
32. I continue to write and rewrite you.
33. Everyone is interested in hearing about your sexuality, your desire.
34. Everyone is interested in learning this language of control.
35. No one is interested in hearing about your problems with love. No one is listening.
36. I fill myself with your image.
37. A place of total fulfillment—where nothing is wanted, all is guaranteed—a return to that first embrace.
38. Primal erection.
39. You are described to me in a childhood fantasy. I recognize you
immediately.
40. I have no need of anything beyond this moment.
41. Where are you?
42. Lost as an object of love.
43. No horizon here. No end in sight.
44. Your unhappiness now excludes me—negates me. It constitutes you outside of me.
45. A preparation for the final act of abandonment.
46. I rehearse it again.
47. A story already written and yet to be read.
48. The course of things.
49. Foretold.
50. I was subject not only to you but to the inevitability of our history.
51. I tried to pick it apart, piece by piece, laying bare its skeleton of meaning, and found that there was no "inside," that its dissection was its destruction.
52. Look at what you have done!
53. I am trapped in a system of exchange with you—unable to substitute any other system, foreclosed to any other possible outcome except for those that are preordained by my own construction.
54. Lost. I have lost sight of what I am saying.
55. I begin this scene again; write its first lines.
56. A knot tied by my own hand.
57. I ask myself time and again, a question to which I clearly know the answer—and yet a part of me still believes that I am incorrect, mistaken, that I have misinterpreted your remark, misunderstood your gesture.
58. How should I act when I see you?
59. A sense of resignation creeps in at this moment.
60. The fear of losing significance—with or without you; haunts me.
61. I must be missing something.
62. The lingering of a knee against my knee. A question. A reply.
63. It is just one thing after another. No resolve.
64. My attempts at escape seem always to be thwarted.
65. A fiction among fictions.
66. There is no resting place here.
67. It is hard to sort through the ruins when it is your own house that is
collapsed. Walls that keep the outside from the inside are rubble and I am left exposed and afraid.
68. I am lost in a world where I exist out of focus, muted, blurred—passing without resonance.
69. Conversations about anything else paralyze me—or is it that I am unable to speak of anything else.
70. There is a slight wind at sea. I imagine you.
71. It is in singular moments of insignificance that I read you most clearly.
72. It is the carelessness of your gestures that you perform most delicately.
73. Your voice has a body of its own.
74. I am able to caress these things without your knowledge.
75. An overwhelming sense of despair engulfs me like a swimmer caught in a current—pulling me further and further from the shore.
76. In those moments when I speak and you, distracted, indifferent, have no reply—it is there that I see the end game of our discourse.
77. The unspoken, the silence between the lines—a clear and precise language for those who know how to perform it.
78. The message comes from a part of us that is hidden in full sight.
79. I see these words in front of me. You appear as a complete stranger.
80. My mind starts racing to the only possible conclusion—final and absolute.
81. I seek out a reflection of my situation—I recognize in a boy’s face the very expression of my own unhappiness.
82. I describe to him a fictional screenplay.
83. In this scene I point to a particular line and say, "this is where he starts and this is where he ends."
84. It is a story about a great storm at sea.
85. In one dramatic sequence I spy through a telescope to catch a glimpse of you in the act of betrayal.
86. My part is played by the young boy.
87. I have problems with this narrative
88. I am caught in the contradiction of its performance.
89. There seems to be no clear demarcation between characters.
90. There is no escape. The text is ours alone. There is no way in or out.
91. I struggle with a compromise. Try to give in to my limitations.
92. I rewrite the opening scene once more. Adjust my theory of language. Alter my manner of speech.
93. Offer this public spectacle.
94. No one is listening.
95. I wait for someone to fall into my trap, to ask about my condition. To turn on this video. No discretion, no boundaries. Here now. My retelling this tale continues unchecked, unresolved.
96. One day I will perfect this scene—every gesture, every word.
97. For now I will leave unfinished.
98. Leave you.
99. Unfinished, unremembered.