your life, and nothing else

They ought to enpipe a dizzyknotted sewerslide system in all apartments so you can slip out into the nothing as no one, which is all you still ask for. Infuriating this indignity lying liminally between your cavernous desolation and the anonymous crowd gauntlet of petty observability haunted by specters you semiknow. Awkwardly yes hahaing through how are yous mumbled for the sake of not having to explain any feeling, even the fact you feel. Creaking open the door late at late at night, having not been outside for long enough the shell has been swallowed, so nakedly desperately not to externalize, endure the humiliation of existing within the same space as those with whom you could never share it, communal redolence of lives merely adjacent: “Tables are scattered around the cavernous, curiously sterile space. / You don’t do much cooking yourself these days, but clearly other residents do. Every day you smell strong coffee, freshly baked bread and cookies, cheap instant noodles, mouthwatering blends of spices, and the eggs someone always feels the need to hard-boil into oblivion.” None of it yours, gray ghostness of an inaccessible present, presences as listlessly implicit in “Posters on the walls” surfacerefusing “the only real source of color in the room.” Drained of the persistence to withered, and of so increasingly embarrassed. Avoided everyone in the delusion you don’t have to appear. “You’re not sure exactly when, but you stopped looking in the mirror after a while. You avoid its gaze again today.” A dwelling, they called it, and you couldn’t help but laugh; on the bus home you cried a bit but in the moment it seemed godshakingly funny. Maybe one day it will be, you mutter to the dark corners. Surrendered the present but not yet a future, freedom of dreams deep into late afternoon: “Gray light hurts thirst for it burn for it / Too much in the posters all worlds at once like mirrors”.

Because that yearning still is youthfully convinced of a tomorrow, we brave the humiliations, engage with those nearest, enterprising the infinite distance between. Neighbors, not names, we beseech urgently to breakthrough to something, someone. Mostly they talk at you, usually at the vagueness of you, courier of their whims for some other satiation. Persisting you sweatingly manifesting the miracle: “It’s been a while since you’ve seen him so peaceful. No tear stains on his cheeks, no sign of a haunting in his eyes. You pull up a chair and watch the movie with him, share a couple of drinks. His laughter, when it comes, is surprising yet inevitable, a hot spring bubbling up from unseen depths. / When you get up to leave, his smiling face is as open as a child’s. “It’s been really nice meeting you. We should do this again.” / Of course, you think but don’t say, returning to the hall.” But tomorrow is not the next day but another day. Subjected to cycles stronger than your will to break them, encounters calcify, intimations never make their intimacy. Worlds presented at you as screens: “You know the notebook he’s talking about. He’s shown you before. He never seems to pay attention to the dates in the upper right-hand corners of the pages. / You can’t help him here. You leave him to his thoughts.” Every new domain opened to you is hollow because you are, that’s who you are. You wouldn’t be at home in fulfilment. The liminal is within you. “You know now that all worlds still open to you are here inside these walls … You could give yourself what you’re pretty sure you deserve, but you’d never stop resenting every grateful smile or beautiful strain of music that would still reach you, reminding you of what you could have allowed yourself.”

Suitable to the foggy lugubriations, sentences cataract: “The tile mosaic on the floor makes your head spin. The pattern is phosphenic, obscene.” Filmic, the mosaic of fragments forms superloaded representations that shadowlengthen the progressions to montage: “Sulfur and sex and azalea and antiseptic”, each quality suggestive of depths the direction doesn’t chase. A fragile illusion, though, not only because sometimes the superfluity tinks hollow, as in vague gestures to candles scented of “musk and ozone and something you can’t place”, but also because whenever the ambiguity persists past its aloofness, the allusion extrudes its unplace, as in this slight unsettlement that sloughs its sensuous uncertainty with a logical doorslam:“A pleasant breeze stirs the room and makes a bouquet on the table tremble. The window is closed. Maybe there’s a fan somewhere you don’t see.” Maybe, yes, but one doesn’t need fiction for their explicable shivers.

Reliance on fleetness to prevent the facades from graying out to the empty spaces implied serves the story its well enough, but it does make the nightmare shift somewhat unearned. “eyeseyeseyeseyes” it shrieks, and I’m like, sure. There are teases of a deeper tension which allure: “You fall on your knees, a supplicant, before the dispenser. Mouth open, tongue lolling, you paw at the lever. / How many times have you chosen to unknow like this, to turn away before facing the full truth? How many times have you seen it in its enormity?” But eager to know more, we must inquire it of the link to the credits. Vastness, its capacity to erase, offwhites the blankness bared.