I Suffer This Lack
But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn.
The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.
If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.
And if our hands should meet in another dream, we shall build another tower in the sky. — Khalil Gibran, "The Farewell", The Prophet
I wear an amorphous cloak that bears your scent, smudged by our togetherness. I yearn for an unceasing embrace with you, if not for a longing for that very yearning. Subisco questa mancanza: I now experience it in the most visceral sense. There is a difference between not having expectations in the present – a kind of indifference – and the confounding failure in summoning up the imagination in anticipating events in the future about to unfold – a kind of shock to the totality of one’s being, coming at you unbidden: the slow but forceful unraveling of the realization that the effect you have on me is anything but neutral. I miss you, and I suffer this lack, your lack; and in this suffering, is my catharsis.