They don’t get it.
The people I know — friends, relatives — they all have me under seige. They want to know how I am, why won’t I write, answer the telephone, reply to their emails.
They don’t get it.
What would I say? I don’t answer my mail, the phone calls, the email, because it reminds me of my existence. To answer with anything other than ” I would like to kill myself!” would be a lie. I cannot bear to lie. I cannot bear my existence. It is a catch-22. If I called them back or wrote, what would I say? At least they can sleep knowing they have done their duty: called, written, whatever.
“Well, I tried to reach out to him. He just never responded.”
A response assumes a cellular organism capable of feeling. If you cannot feel, you cannot respond.
Besides, if I told them how I felt they would just accuse me of feeling sorry for myself. They are cold people incapable of empathy. Better to say nothing at all.
Beckett: ” I can’t go on, so I’ll go on.”
We think that because we write about political lives we are somehow different. We are not. The lie behind these blogs — cyber band-aides for psychic wounds — the lie is that they solve something, balm for the soul, the loneliness.
Write all you want, scribes, it is still there.