As happens occasionally, my ordinary ‘mood state,’ in which my internal life is comprised of several strings of narrative having to do with irrelevant cultural phenomena (the iPhone controversy, college football, David Foster Wallace, the Raconteurs, Becker on death, Koestler on the French, etc.), dissolved into a paroxysm of tears and regret a moment ago.

I imagine that this happens to everyone on at least a monthly basis, and if it doesn’t it is because they have more advanced ‘coping mechanisms’ than I do [by ‘coping mechanisms’ I don’t mean healthy psychic structures for processing experiences, but rather successful cultural practices for ignoring them: drinking a bit, eating a lot, passive consumption of media, buying things, pretending to have fun, etc.].

Life supplies us all with so much anguish that I find it hard (not impossible) to believe that a sane person could avoid weeping for more than four weeks at a time.  Assuming you can ignore the fact that baby alligators primary predatory is fire ants, meaning that some creatures are born into the bright hot world full of fear, have no idea how to move or whence their food comes, and are then slowly killed by burning, painful poison administered by hundreds of insects; and you can ignore wars, always here, always horrible, whatever the context; and accidents, when mothers and daughters die in flaming hot air balloons; and disease, in infants and the elderly; and all the other horror abounding everywhere, and the indifference with which it is met, the voluntary refusal to emotionally acknowledge starvation, poverty, decay; and its unalterable permanence in the world; assuming you can ignore all that, what about the tragedies of your own life?

I loved Sofia.  She had adorable habits, and a sweet voice.  She was silly, and had a lovely and idiosyncratic style: cute shirts, ludicrous sweaters, knit hats, fun shoes.  She was smart, but often dazed.  She was sweet, but defensive and fierce.  She was...  Let me say this, and please understand this is the most I can do with my mind and it means so much to me, however much it means to you: she was sui generis, totally unique, like no one else I’ve ever known.  She came from strangeness.

Sofia was Sofia.  I adored her.  She was my first love.  We had so much fun together.  With her, I became who I am.  My habits and attire, my interests and my tastes: they are as much hers as mine.  My heart is as much hers as mine.  I have no idea who I was or what I thought before Sofia, and I don’t care to remember.

Sofia loved me.  She loved me like crazy, and was wonderful about it: she sweetly complimented my limitless vanity, flattered my narcissistic insecurity, took care of my humiliated pride.  She never bothered me to change.  She demanded nothing of me, and thought herself lucky to have me.

[It wrenches my heart to write that.  Who would be lucky to know me?  I am scum, and I know it.  No one in their right mind sees me as anything but a fucking mess, and an asshole too: ask my friends; they will tell you].

She tolerated my overbearing opinions, my critical hostility, my rudeness, my dirtiness, my laziness.  She didn’t object.  We lived the way we lived and we were happy.  We were happier than I thought possible before meeting her.  I didn’t know I was allotted that sort of contentment; my lot, I had assumed, was suffering.

But we fought.  Constantly.  Was it my doing, or hers?  Neither: after three years, it was clear to me that Sofia and I were simply incompatible.  We were both so lonely and attracted to one another that we simply didn’t notice until we already loved each other.

And we toughed it out.  But in the end, it became unbearable for me, so I ended it and we parted.  And what’s happened since has been absolutely catastrophic: I dated a sorority girl in an Orientalist’s costume, a white-trash dominatrix in a victim’s costume, and an anorexic pathological liar; the latter was the best of the three.

And I twisted myself into something awful: I coveted girls, and misrepresented myself, and became inarticulate, and dissimulated, and drank, and smoked, and fell to pieces, and then began the current phase of my life: the Great Lie.  It might also be called my American Male phase: I flee from my doubts and fears and sorrows into gadgetry, management, sophistry, solipsism, and so on.  I am on the run, all the time.  I don’t know who I am.

I cannot even honestly tell you if I am happy or not.  I often seem to be, but not deeply happy.  As I wrote to a friend about my breakup with Sofia:

I keep waiting to sort of process and contextualize it, the unfairness of it, the injustice of it, and forgive the world for it, forgive the nature of reality for it. But it isn't happening, and I am very, very bitter about it. I loathe myself for it, and the world of love, and indeed the world at large. Nothing works! Entropy is everywhere. Death awaits. And we have nothing.

I would like to tell boys and girls in school: be careful about love.  Its failure will scar you, horribly; you will not recuperate.  You will not move on.  If you give yourself to someone, and they give themselves to you, you will not be free of suffering until you make a new self; and when you’re twenty-six, and bitter, and lonely, the self you make will disgust you: you give in to all the lowest temptations: cynicism, misogyny, materialism, and so on.

I spend so much time hating so much; and fearing so much; and wishing I would never have met the people I know, to whom I am bound now forever.  Better never to have loved at all, truly.

Because the fact is this: I loved Sofia, but I cannot be with her.  It is as fundamental as death.    Again, quoting my conversation with a friend:

To be frank, I feel about what happened with us as you might a car accident or war that deprived you of a loved one: it was unavoidable and irreversible; in the case of the war, it might even have been "right." But it is another example of why one can justifiably criticize the world for being an orgy of irreducible suffering. It didn't work; it would never have worked; it wasn't working. But no one else has ever loved me like that, and I've never loved anyone like that; and I sincerely (and, if you can believe it, in a non-maudlin way) wonder if I ever will again. I don't think about her daily; but she is the only ex I've had that still makes me weep, and mostly because I wish we had been compatible. I loved her, and wish I could have protected her from the world

I wish that I could have protected her from the world, which consists of imperfection and failure and misery; but love and trust and desire aren’t enough.  Nothing is.