Season Of Hollow Soul

Fate must have a reason
Why else endure the season
Of hollow soul



k.d. lang, in Ingénue (1991)

It’s a horribly wretched feeling. I suppose they’re like drugs, maybe - I wouldn’t really know, since I tend to eschew all sorts of chemical substances, including prescribed medication - all I know is: I feel utterly miserable without them.

Some days, you wake up with a head full of them, crowding, buzzing; when your eyes close in the night, they’re still buzzing away, keeping you up when you’re trying to sleep.

Then one day, suddenly, they’re gone. You never know when they’ll be back. You think, maybe they’re still here, somewhere, buried just a little deeper down, and you reach down, down, and yet deeper down - but nothing. You’ve reached into a void, and maybe, unbeknownst to yourself, you’ve reach so deep down into the vacuum that is yourself, you’ve fallen into it, and you are obliterated unto yourself.

(But then, what is life without words?)

Other times, it’s not so bad. Between their coming and their going, you are kept occupied by something else - music, maybe, or doodling - something: anything is better than nothing.

The Monday before last, I’d wanted to remember Zara’s smile. I’ve always thought her eyes are expressionless, even when she is chatting animatedly (well, animatedly for her), and especially when she seems to be smiling.

But that Monday, she’d smiled at me, and for the rest of the day, I kept thinking about her smile: how, for the first time, I’d thought her eyes had showed something - something warm, something gentle. I wanted to remember how I’d immediately thought her smile looked strangely tender, almost … maternal - and how I’d spent the rest of that day, and most of that week, thinking about it.

Last Thursday, I’d wanted to remember how I spent an hour, and the rest of that week, fetishizing Anna’s rose-bud tattoo and shoulder.

And yesterday, it was Zara’s entrance; how she walked into class about ten minutes late, looking so fresh, she looked like a semi-Gothic Gaea, when the rest of us appeared to have all been caught in the heavy, relentless drizzle on our way to school.

But I can’t remember them the way I want to; I can’t record them down the way I’d seen them - not precisely, and not at all perfectly.

Life without words is terrible.

Many times when they were gone, I’d thought it was just a sort of mental constipation (and all I needed was a sort of cerebral laxative to relief myself), but now I think I’d been wrong the whole time. Constipation implies the presence of something; when all you have is nothing, you can’t possibly be constipated.

This time round, I think it must be really getting to me. Since Monday, I've been having the sensation that something is stuck in my throat. It's not choking me, but no matter how much water I drink or how hard I swallow, what it is is still there, irritating me.

It is irritating enough for me to want to shove my hand down my throat and wrench out the part of my alimentary canal extending from the pharynx to the esophagus.

Or, failing that, slit my damn throat.