What does it mean to ‘connect’ with another person? Is it the sudden acknowledgment of some shared trait, like or dislike, ideology or indifference? Is it the perception of essence, of the being that cannot be judged or analyzed or in any way reduced to some reflected form? On the other hand, is it the perception of a fragment of yourself in the other, or the fragment of the other in yourself? Or is it simply the laughter with which you greet an irascible outburst?
Whatever the case may be, I am deficient in this quality of connexion. I have come a long way since my days of the constructed self, but still this quality of separation clings to me like cellophane, binding all conversation, all interaction in a net of adjacent possibility. Something does not click.
Most of the time.
When the tangents of mutual expression do weave themselves across and between, I am immersed in that sublime liquidity, that tattoo of intercourse. And a single moment of this casts its white shadow across an eternity of broken bridges. The gulf is forgotten.
I have a feeling that I have yet to commit myself entirely to this life. Until I do, I shall forever be outside, looking in.
