What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.
It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
The word intimacy comes from the Latin root intimum, which means your interiority, your innermost core. Unless you have something there, you can’t be intimate with anybody. You cannot allow intimum, intimacy, because they will see the hole, the wound, and the pus oozing out of it.
The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its colour and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of non-conviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the centre, and rising hope. The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
You don’t have time for chitchat or lunch or anything that distracts you from your single-minded focus. You don’t care about being liked, you care about getting what you want. Not a great way to make and keep friends. But the only way to be truly relentless.
To touch someone is to risk pain, to risk rejection, be it your own or that of another. […] It is a bridge you walk together, swaying above an abyss of fear. To hold each other’s hands is to have balance. Yet it also means having their weight with you, should there be a sudden fall.
Suppose someone said to you for God’s sake open up to me, and for a second you did, a window unlatching itself inside, a thousand crows flying out into the silence.
A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
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