by Penelope Dieppa
I have always felt like I could die happy. Not because I have achieved everything I have wanted to, I have never had penetrative sex, I have never graduated college, I have never been able to look into another’s eyes and feel, since that’s all that life is—feeling—I have never looked into another’s eyes and felt they truly saw me for who I was. I am, by my own definition, a failure and a half-person. Young and possibly on the path to pursuing my goals, though I have little to show for all my efforts.
No, I feel like I could die happy since I too often wish for moments to last forever. Many times I will be on the train on my way to my destination, work or school or to see a friend, the strings that pull me here and there, and while I ride the train and look to the other faces and lives and occupations with me in the car, I would like to ride it for a few more stops. Though here we arrive, at my station, and I must plant both feet on the ground, stand, disembark. When I feel the warm breeze spin through me as the summer crowns on the edges of May. Every time I kiss someone, no matter if I like them or if they or I are any ‘good’ at the exchange, I want to never stop kissing them. Those first moments in the morning, where you must consciously recall the narrative threads of your life. When someone holds me or I hold them, our bodies interlocked; for a small moment, for a thin, almost imperceptible fraction of a second, I wish it would last forever. Though I quickly realize it cannot, I won’t let it, I pull away, I have to eat, I have to sleep in a few hours, I will have to work, to report to the government my existence.
That moment of wishing, of being completely content with how my life has carved itself, to lead to the very moment I wish to last for all eternity, is very short. It’s always short. If it were longer I might actually try to have it last forever. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I hesitate before getting off at my station. I could ride the train to the end of the line, walk until my feet bleed. I go in to kiss one time too many, after what was gained from the exercise had been gained.
I think quite possibly—that the moment I speak of, that moment of pure euphoria, since that is how I would describe it, pure momentary bliss—is a part of me dying. That I die ever so slightly, some part of my soul degrades, a grain of sand taken from a beach. And such is the source of the anxiety which plagues me. I worry the more I want—the more I experience that orgasmic second—so short that, once I realize what has occurred, it is already long over—the more I wish for moments to last forever: that beach will become tide.
I worry the emergence of that free, empty ocean of my eroded soul will not correlate to my age, and the beach will disappear before I reach the average lifespan. That my soul will entirely degrade by the time I turn, say, 40, and I will be forced to then live the latter half of my life in a malaise. Where I become incapable of enjoying anything.
Or possibly rather, and this might be the preferable option: I will kill myself when my soul reaches such a point.
I will turn 40, my last second of bliss coming as I blow out the candles on the cake my partner had purchased from a bakery near where we live. I will then die, internally, eternally, pelagic. I will sit in our kitchen, watching as my family eats the cake around me. They will talk about their days, their lives, the effect I have had on all of their decisions and outlooks, and I will feel nothing. I will have no desires except to kill myself. To prevent the body from making any change of direction for the life that my soul steered into formation.
I will go to sleep that night. Maybe my lover would try to have sex, celebratory, I will refuse. I will have to. In some way, it will be rape. Necrophilic rape. My body will not want it, it should not want it, I hope it will be aware of how wrong it would be. I pray it will not take advantage of the fact that no one will ever know—my partner believing the body is still inhabited by the person they married. Hopefully they will see the body’s vacant eyes and understand what happens next.
After my partner is asleep, I will have to get out of bed, walk into the street outside the home we share, and find a high platform to jump from. If I cannot find a high platform, high enough to ensure I die on impact, I will drown myself in a body of water. A lake or swimming pool. Or I will search for myself and go into the ocean, reuniting with what had withered away over the decades.
Every time that feeling overwhelms me for even a fraction of a second, I think, “It is now time.” I think of finding a tall building, going to the top floor, opening a window, and shoving myself through. But quickly do I realize other feelings have returned, that I have not gone completely numb, that I might live to see another moment of ecstasy.
***
The air inside had a quaint, dry feeling, similar to how early man must have felt in caves after long hiking journeys and bivouacs. The world in which everything was new and nothing was known, how beautiful it must have been to see for the first time, all of it undefined and blurry at its edges, the appearance of cohesion, the search for connection. To rest underneath the outcrop of a cliff, shielded from the elements, and omnisciently observe that great expanse.
I watched the rain patter the windows as the professor at the front of the room spoke about Pissaro. It was quiet save for his voice and the rain, which melted together into a calm recording one could use to fall asleep. Behind him was Rue de l'Épicerie, Rouen, desaturated and clear, made entirely of light, and it sat on the wall like a thin plastic film.
It was comfortable on the walk to the subway station, and I could hear the tight sloshes of running water echoing from the underground basilicas barred within the gutter. I was one of the pedestrians on the street. I saw myself as others do.
Like the people I am surrounded by when I visit a foreign country. Those people in the train or at the cafe or walking into the hospitals and offices. All of them having lived their entire lives there. Thought about everything in a foreign language. They so easily blended into the street, made their way around corners, fully embodied the spaces that surrounded them or made vague gestures and moans when hassled by rail conductors or interrogated by waiters.
When they stepped past glossy superstructures that jutted out from and surrounded century-old buildings, they moved with such ease. Their movements did not carry any weight and could be regarded as inconsequential. If you were to ask this person what they just did, they wouldn’t consider their steps nor their eye movements nor the thoughts they just then experienced, to be something they had done. And would rather look at you, bewildered, and storm off or ask for more clarification in their accented tones. It was because, in their mind, they hadn’t stepped anywhere. They were inside themselves actively, even as you questioned them. Since the external, all of the people on the street who share the experiences of the world, of an election or education or corporation, what we describe as one’s culture, composed itself to fold such a pedestrian into its narrative. It morphed and stretched to appeal to the ever-changing tides of progress; applications accepted, visual design worked around the way rivers cut into and eroded the landscapes you lived within as a child, it developed as both you and the world gained new desires and scientific knowledge. That synchronicity between their organic-life and the inorganic-life of institutions—impossible to truly understand, as neither have known existence without the other—meant as they walked down that street in a familiar city, having an awareness of their lives as it relates to those of others, not thinking of where they are but only of where they are going, the decision to walk was not taken but rather granted, granted by the surroundings, by the feeling that their oneness, their being, was not just in their body but had actually blanketed all that they could see and feel.
I sat on the subway car, surrounded by tall wet coats all packed in, with arms reaching up for the bars, and we all entered one another.
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Penelope Dieppa was born in the Leningrad Oblast and studies in Brooklyn. She'll update you on Karl Ove Knausgaard on Twitter @KnausgaardFacts.
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