You’ve witnessed the cycles as endless returns – the never-ending request for change, the never-ending quest for improvement. You’ve come to believe you deserve it. This is revenge for a history of what they called abuse. This is revenge for a history of what they called manipulation. This is your karma – to be trapped, to be used, to be manipulated, to be abused, emotionally, physically, financially. In truth, you’ve never put your hand on a thing. In truth, you’ve never coated your love with lies. You’re a cheater, as honest as any cheater can be. You’re a deserter, as honest any deserter can be. You were the kind to get hopes high and leave before the chance of disappointment – which always became disappointing.
You’ve thought forever on your past and locked yourself in its suffocating reification. You were chasing after being better, doing better, treating better, loving better – through a circle of self-interrogation – even if you were never given the full arsenal of tools to be able to discern the injury. You pieced through the hieroglyphic archives of your personal history and devoted yourself to the end of a repetition. Not this time, you said. Not this time. And yet, sometimes you wish you were the boy you were before rather than the man you are now. For, if you were anything as a boy, it is true, that you were a deserter. An embracer, yes. A lover, for certain. But, a deserter, perhaps even more than a cheater. You were always trying to leave. You were always finding ways that the love was never worth it. You were always finding ways to give up, to give in, before the pain of love dragged you into a situation where you might have lost yourself completely in being-with. Displace and distance, a past lover said. You were always displacing and distancing. But, you were always after being-with. You were always after a love that felt worth it. And each displacement and each distancing, you’ve learned, were self-sacrificial. A hatred-within. A disdain-with. A sense of imposter syndrome in the face of a lover. Eventually they’ll discover I am worthless, you said. Eventually they’ll discover I am nothing. I shall depart before such a discovery is made. In retrospect all the failure taught you about yourself. Your absolute wrongness of being, your absolute dereliction in psyche. You are a situation and a half away from insanity – an emotionally depressed (not angry) borderline personality disorder. You are a nigger boy by trade, and a sexist by ordination. You are nothing by day, and a question of peculiar fascination by night, constantly finding yourself asking over and over again: Might the world be better without me?
You’re a “man” now, and what you didn’t know then, that you do know now is that to be a man is to be an abuser. It is sociogenic to the lay out of your always already. It is the fact at the end of a long history of Patriarchal rule. No unlearning unlearns this fact. There are no “men” on the opposite side of misogyny. Perhaps, this is why masochism is the rue of your new day. Deleuze argues the masochism functions in accordance to the Law of the Mother in and against the imperative of the Father’s authority. Perhaps, you embrace the new rule of abuse under a new code of dishonor to be undone as a man. To be abused such that your manhood may never get expressed, so that you boyhood will forever remain repressed. To be neither man nor boy, but victim. In your mind, it is better to be victim than man and the world has shown you over and over that there is no meeting point for those two when abuse is concerned. There is no vocabulary for you that might not re-instate the carcerality of the heart. To say, “Me Too,” without wanting her gone, without wanting her thought to be diminished, without wanting punishment, damnation, ridicule, or cancellation. To say, “Me Too,” without silencing her, without speaking over her, without over-talking, over-thinking, over-shadowing.
You’ve never found a way to do this. So you shutter in silence knowing that very few will care and even less will understand. To say you are harming me and I do not want you to experience any karmic retribution. I do not know want you gone, but I cannot have you here. To move away from the way in which patriarchy theaters any cross-gender discussion as a battlefield rather than a healing. How do we heal? We first must know what it is need of healing. I am calling these bruises and abuses, and the cages they generate in homes, communities and prisons – the carcerality of the heart. To free the heart is to heal the heart, and the truth must be known on how she breaks you too, and how you may have broken a her before her – in action and inaction, in appearance and disappearance, in emotion and physicality. In this instance, you are “the victim” but any instance you are the dissection of the dichotomy which situates “victimhood” as distinct from “perpetrator.” Take no pride in your victimhood, for pride in victimhood is a gateway to the carceral. Take no pride in your perpetration, for pride in perpetration is the carceral itself. To be neither man nor boy nor victim, to be free of category as carceral conceptualization. Where do we go from here?
Dear lover, dear friend, dear reader, I do not know.
Mumble Theory 