At Certain Points We Touch

by Lauren John Joseph

Disinterred, exhumed, hauled up from such an early grave comes the writer I had all but abandoned, here to type out the opening line, When did you know you were dead?

The significance of the day’s date has opened like a portal onto mania. The phantasmagoric nature of its revelation, materialising before me on that lonely neon crucifix, driving me into a frenzy of desperation, contrition, and rage. And what is there to be gained now, after all this time? Am I hoping to perform some act of penance here on the page?

In truth, it was this aura of sadness that you radiated, as much as your physical allure, which drew these lovers to you, the anger and the pain that played across your face involuntarily. Or rather it was the tragic combination of the two, the defiled and the carnal, which spoke to the devoted masochists who offered themselves to you.

fumbling our way in the darkness towards the people we were growing into, towards each other.

We almost missed each other entirely, leapling, isn’t that a strange thing to think about now? The retrospective shudder I feel, when I think that we might never have met, can make this connection seem almost mystical; but then, every lover was once a stranger.

It’s likely that I seduced myself, reading your messages under my breath in the library, in my own voice, imbuing your words with my choice of intonation.

This impulse, to pack up and go extemporaneously, on the spur of the moment, to throw all my plans out of the window and do the exact opposite of what I had set out to do, has come to define me. This and my insistence on running straight towards the thing most likely to do me harm.

But these aren’t the things that are most pronounced when you are in love, they are truths which reveal themselves over time, like the bones of a skeleton as the flesh rots away.

The gap between that morning, when I left your bed for the first time, and this extrasolar evening, from where I sit at my kitchen table in Mexico City trying to write it out, is bridged by a love story so white-hot as to burn my hands even as I attempt to put it down on paper.

It’s like a movie I watched when I was high. The images shimmer somewhere in the murky depths, I know I have watched this film before, but I can’t pull up anything I would trust as a real, true detail, because everything has been embellished by these years of grief, guilt and remorse.

it’s somehow official, ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s too late, I know that these words can’t amount to anything more than artifice now, but maybe I can find some shelter for myself in that fabrication, in Nietzsche’s maxim, We have art in order not to die of the truth.

I guess in penning this book I’ve come to accept the terms of my sentence; writing is the responsibility of the survivors.

remember that first summer of knowing you as being one extended sunset, eternally crepuscular. And if I recall it as being intensely warm (though it was probably just an average English crossfade from June to July) that’s simply because it never rains in the past.

There’s something too painful in remembering how full of potential everything seemed back then when the world was ours. I find myself flinching from even happy memories now, for fear of discovering new ways to wound myself in amongst the rubble of a glorious past.

I took him there, to be suave, to be chic, to prove to myself that I could love not just fuck.

What is this hold you have over me?

The real shocker is that the future seems to be so too, and all of these gestures we make, all of these cave paintings are just ways of killing a few hours before bed. All time is here. The dissociation becomes quickly terrifying, when you consider that you maybe aren’t the driver, just the car.

Sex you can find anywhere, but a warm connection like ours was is a rarer thing, and one that I felt the loss of profoundly.

‘Only some of your friends just don’t seem very nice.’ ‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied, ‘but neither does meth until you’ve smoked it, and even then it still seems like a horrible idea, only then you’re jonesing for it.’

These are the first, probably the last, maybe the only gentle moments we spent together in all the time I knew you.

Everybody else had (I presume) silently agreed, on my behalf, not to invite you, though in reality this was really a party in your honour; this trip, this new chapter was dedicated to you, or rather to putting the continents back where they belonged, between us.

Through it all my heart throbbed and my ego smarted, when I recalled your spiteful tone and your easy smile. I was still embittered, still in love. New York was purgatory to me, for a long time.

The whole time I was in London, I had been so wound up in you, nothing else had registered as having any importance. I hadn’t written a line, I hadn’t worked on anything, I had almost totally forgotten that I had any potential, any dreams.

You see, every single significant moment in my life had been purely accidental, the result of my tripping over and falling into some new, unexpected situation, and hoping I would be alright when I stood up again.

‘One can’t be dead, death is not a state one can exist in,’ and this proved him right. Surely enough, though I went on living I ceased to exist, I wasn’t dead, but I was headed quite outside of my life.

Your hand reaches out now, from the past, to touch my chest and it finds the flesh of the future, because I have outlived you, and so you linger in my sexual vocabulary, haunting my orgasms.

I know I am destroying you, you as you were, by trying to preserve you as I wanted you to be.

You’re crestfallen. I’ve won. No. No one wins here.

‘If we spoke one word we’d speak more, and I don’t think I have the strength to turn away from him again.

I should leave it here, wrapping the story up with this last encounter, our final slanging match, the conclusion for which we were always headed; but I can’t. I’m not ready to finish yet, I’m not ready to let go, because I know that with this book I will kill you, for good.

But your death was unscripted, it came out of nowhere, in the middle of so much, and it cut me up so badly that the scars are now a distinguishing feature of mine.

‘I will never be able to remember you accurately, but infinitely.’

During an argument once, my mother told me that I live my life like a sunbather in the park, forever moving the blanket to chase the sun, desperate to catch just another five minutes of self-indulgence before twilight. I think she’s right. I have chased every high, every dopamine hit, every good time I could get, I have decried my most heartfelt desires as the hallucinations of a drug-addled brain, I have tried to outrun myself indefinitely, but still life has led me here. The inevitability of it all.

You died before I fell out of love with you, you see, unlike the other lovers I was done with when we broke, and of whom I hardly ever think. With them the end had come, and whether with flaming acrimony or soppy forgiveness, we had accepted it. But with you there was so much left undone, so much unaccounted for, and that’s why I have never managed to fully absolve myself of you.