404 Documents ten: the Other

(More 404.) 


I was sitting with Stella at the crap diner we frequented. The food was terrible, but there was something comforting in how constantly underachieving the place was. She absentmindedly pushed her deep fried Cod through a trough of mayonnaise and relish with her fork. There was a drawn out and somewhat uncomfortable silence.

Silences like that have always been the death of me. They are so excruciating that I’ll say anything to make it stop. Usually it is harmless, some random detritus floating at the top of my mind like a cluster of oil-soaked pelicans. But sometimes it isn’t.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” I said.

She stopped chewing for a moment, but then nodded as if she had already known that. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

We kept chewing in silence.

I guess this wasn’t one of those times. I hadn’t blown anything. But her lack of response was telling: it was already starting to show. Because it was true. I never before thought a mind was something you could lose, but now, I’m just not so sure.

Her eyes were like two porcelain saucers. Beautiful, but empty. I looked down at my food, and suddenly didn’t feel very hungry.


That evening I watched some old movies of myself and Stella.


I realized something: it is very possible to take someone you love for granted, because of the things that you are personally knotted up over. Little inconsequentual things that may bother you about that person. I can be very OCD at times. I have a habit of putting people up on pedestals and then knocking them down when they do not fully meet my own expectations.


When i watched those videos, I realized that at first, she had been very good to me. I truly did love her, but I couldn't help but take her for granted. The reason was simple: I felt insecure about my own faults. It was a game of deflection played out in my own mind, against an invisible judge and jury. 


When I saw things in this person I didn't like, what I was really seeing were pieces of my own self- the things I had rejected that I had yet to even become aware of. We sometimes become infatuated when we view the other as a means to our ends: an escape from ourselves. When the period of 'infatuation' wears off and the 'love' thing can grow- the feeling of being so close to someone you would do anything for them - many run. Maybe my way of doing that was to put under a microscope everything about her that i didn't care for - her taste in music, the way she talked, the things she said, her friends, her ideas. Everything that I didn't like. They were all things I didn't even have a right to judge. But that doesn't keep us from doing it. 


Psychological projection is the name of the game.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here? When we see our mirror image, in sharp and uncomfortable detail in an outsider, the "Other," we begin to see our own faults as if for the first time. You know this about me now. I felt I should tell you to give some frame of reference, or some idea about what Stella meant to me. She was the closest thing, and yet I had made our relationship entirely about me. I had alienated her from the conversation. Everything that followed was just the inevitable result of inertia. 


Fuck. I have to analyze everything, don't I? 

Later, the two of us lay intertwined in bed. I was absently tracing the outline of her hips with my finger when I noticed a small tattoo I somehow hadn’t seen before, slightly above the small of her back. A tiny black and orange butterfly.

“New tattoo?” I asked.

“No. I got it a while ago, when I turned eighteen.”

“Oh.” I’d never noticed it.

A monarch.

I closed my eyes, and felt a calm reverie overtake me, but as I nestled on that ledge above the welcome expanse of sleep, something cold and sharp impressed itself on my consciousness. It was like a wedge of sharp static driven inexorably into my mind. My eye cracked open, and I saw a figure leaning over the bed. It was without any particular features. I can’t say that it had a certain kind of face, or eyes, or nose, or hands, though it had all of those things.

It had skin but I couldn’t say what color, or if it was rough or smooth. It was just that a form, a figure, the very shape of a man without any details filled in, as if an artist had started to sketch and then passed out in a drunken stupor instead. I tried to sit up but found that my limbs wouldn’t respond. Only my eyes seemed to work, and they widened in fear as this form leaned in closer to me, peering right through me with its face-that-wasn’t-a-face, as it put its hands-that-weren’t-hands on my arm, and stepped right inside of my body. I fell then and there into that expanse, but it was no longer welcome. It was an endless free-fall, locked in an invisible embrace with this leaden Other, and my life has never been the same since.