Medication
Melancholy, mystery, and the promise of depth. These were the kinds of pearls she was interested in capturing. She took pleasure in astute existentialism, in the quantum metaphysics of feelings impossible to put into words. She lived in constant motion, driven by his words — more precisely, by the rupture of his words, until he appeared.
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He encoded words differently. He did something to her melancholy, shrouded in mystery, himself a promise of depth. He and his projects, he and his astute, rigorous focus, he who transcribed Fernando Pessoa and whispered him into her ear, he who had prepared himself for the moment, he who smiled and waved at her as though he had known her for an eternity.
That thought now created a fissure in her brain: the doubt as to how anyone could write about anything at all and be so presumptuous as to regard their own voice as a literary voice. It was simply what she felt, and her feelings could not exactly be translated into talent or metrics, because what she felt was longing, incompleteness, restlessness, rootlessness, and the compulsion to expel him, because now he existed in every syllable of justification; he was simply no longer there to witness all her devotion, the disappointment of being adored only to be remembered.
She was certain, although she never put it into words, that she had spent her life using writing as an unrelenting substitute for experience, and that this was her greatest crisis of authenticity and existentialism. Except that experience had finally arrived. He had been her experience — and he had been the desire for its end.
