Nothing that is not false

Decidedly this evening I shall say nothing that is not false, I mean nothing that is not calculated to leave me in doubt as to my real intentions.

— Beckett, Malone Dies

How do I start?

‘How do I start, what do I want to say in these words? And once started how to end? Start with a question, that’s as good a start as any. This question leads to a second question. And then? The void I need to fill, your void, you. The void that enters me and fills me with words.’

Go fuck yourself

X tells me he’ll never give up, he’ll never give in to me. It’s like when he was young and he imagined his older self looking back on himself with a patronising smile. It’s like his father’s smirk. No I’ll never give in, so you can go fuck yourself, he says. Leave me alone.

You’ll pay

The humiliation, says X. That he should end up like this, at my hands, like a dog that looks around not knowing he’s about to be put down. Like a dog. You’ll pay for this, he says, one way or another. You’ll see. Do it, do whatever you want but you’ll pay, something or someone will see to it.

In you

‘You show yourself only by masking yourself. In you my power becomes my powerlessness and my end my beginning.’

In error

X approaches and tells me he’s never escaped this feeling of being in error. Something went badly wrong somewhere and he helped it go wrong and I won’t help him make it right. Why won’t you? he asks. Is it because you won’t or because you can’t? Is it because you’re in error too? Isn’t it because the whole world is in error, because life itself is in error? Duplicity, he spits. The disguises of death. You seem like you know the secret, you seem all innocent, but you’re just as wrong as the rest of us, aren’t you? And now you’re scared I’m getting close to the secret. Aren’t you?

Toppling

‘Can I remember the time before you? Before you supplanted me I supplanted you, is that much clear? It was a time of false mastery, of false growth in a false clearing. So did truth arrive with you, are you truth? You come into my clearing and topple me, fell my hopes, and this toppling is your truth for me even as I grow.’

The flower of death

‘In you my end unfurls and blooms. Like a great flower of death that grows and smothers as it grows. And so my end grows into the light and my death is born over and over.’

The tide

‘This tedium that washes up and over me like a slow grey tide. Only to pull me out and apart, suddenly. Are you ebb or flow, which you do I trust?’

Hall of mirrors

‘I turn to look at you and you disappear like smoke. I speak your name and you recede through all names like a reflection in a hall of mirrors.’