Oh, Ineffable Intimacy.

THIS MORNING HAS BEEN MARKED BY RUMINATION. Vera is in surgical prep right now for her hysterectomy. I admit to a sense of helplessness, doing my best to offer support from afar. Part of me is relieved that she can’t see my constant pacing, the wetness in my eyes. How can one grieve for something one doesn’t even have? Anatomical differences transcended by mirror neurons. Our history of physical intimacy in my ken, now upset by uterine plasmic chaos. These “Limit Situations,” facilitated over fibre optic distances. We are looking up at the same sky, yet she may as well be on Mars, the Vistula Valles stretching out beyond a sterile hospital window.

She sends me photos from the preparation bench, a raw self-portrait— She’s wearing the tortoise shell glasses I picked out for her five years ago. Memories become encoded in the artefacts of our lives. How many of them will outlive us? How many of our precious things once held significance to others? Perhaps, in the end, memory is all we really have—Instances of experience, emotion that lives only as long as we do. Without some preserving apparatus, they become lost to entropy; returned to the state of primordial chaos from which our minds emerged. How will I remember this? I see no resignation on her face, no surrender. Instead I see poise, a courage, purity of spirit in the face of molecular injustice.

She asks me what I am doing; what I am always doing now, writing, recording these Human instances—for what, I don’t know. Urban legend holds that Proust wrote right up to the very moment of his death. For the first time, in a long time, I feel in the company of that significance. I am no longer hostage to futility.

I study her ice-blue eyes, brimming with introspection. I have no platitudes to offer, no trite, mystical Instagram sayings. I can only project my presence, Share the agonising anticipation, the hurry-up-and-wait of these modern, industrial absurdities. She calls me, mid-sentence. I let my thought slip away, a fair price to pay for the chance to be even closer. We talk, share jokes. There is a slight tremor in her voice. I ask her if the journey is worse than the destination, in this instance. I take her through what to expect-one more time; the loss of consciousness, waking up where she started, with a sense of lost time. Hard evidence of medical procedures performed by strangers’ unseen hands, dissociation. I may as well be describing an alien abduction.

“I am with you.”

”I am with you.”

Our shorthand in this “Limit Situation.” Frustrated by distance, I give her all the encouragement I can muster before the nurses return and before we can even say our proper goodbyes, she’s whisked away to the place we have both been dreading for a month. Only the uncertain remains.

Facing three hours alone with my thoughts, waiting, trusting. Distracting myself with my daily tasks. Talking to my dogs as I envy their supranormal yet limited awareness. Reaching that far horizon of experience, fingers crossed, for a meadow.

8:30 pm

STILL NO WORD. There can be little as ghastly as anticipation. Here there is an opportunity to practice my vaunted stoicism. Epictetus says:

What upsets people is not the things in themselves, but their judgements about the things.

I am but a detail in a pile of details, no doubt my request for updates was lost in the undertow. Panic is a choice; there’s always tomorrow. We cannot control the actions of others, but we can control our reaction to them.  The goal is not to become devoid of feeling, but to assign the right judgements to our feelings.  We can enjoy life’s fruits so long as we don’t desire more than is within our control. To fail in this is to surrender our agency to the monsters of expectation.  Things will go as they must.

5:05 AM

WAKING WITH A START AS I OFTEN DO, contemplating the air traffic, ILS approaches to the airport, industrial confession that we’re just past the witching hour. I face the recovering insomniac’s dilemma: to rise and seize this waking flare of energy, or coax a return to sleep? A chummy two-tone chime cuts-in to my deliberations, the text tone I picked for Vera. There she is.

Imhere

Sorry its been such a rough journey

Cohldnt even text

I’m here too.

Elation and sadness coexist; they don’t self-annihilate. I can hear the drug-induced slur drawling her speech as if she’s on the other side of the room. There are long pauses between utterances, she’s drifting in and out of sleep in the pre-dawn darkness, two hours away.

Im alive and well (despite massive pain)

No need to apologise!

Just glad you’re here.

We take so much for granted; making mountains of molehills, stagger through our all too finite lives on planet small; oblivious to these moments, pearls of contact happening between the lines. Wasted on the opium of expectation, we live for our next meal, our next promotion, our next holiday, or next orgasm, diamond rings, the wages of Mammon are the commodification of human experience. In this mode of non-being, the world remains a minefield for as long as we are self-unaware. Maybe it’s time to tune out of the cheapening of life by cynical marketing agencies and drop into being human–taste it, take it into every pore and every cell. Authentic meaning unfolds all around us.