Dog

 Help! I’m Stuck In The South Of France With My Deteriorating Lesbian Relationship During COVID! 

 

Dear Aunt Daisy,

Me and my girlfriend have been long distance (different countries) since Covid began, and we’ve been managing pretty well, visiting each other when restrictions let up. As there is an exemption for travel if you’re in a relationship, I recently went to the South of France to visit her family home there. Also, I knew she was having a tough time and I thought I could provide emotional support. However, on arrival I immediately realised something was wrong – she was very cold to me, as was her mother, and it kept getting worse and worse despite me initiating conversations about the obvious issue, and being visibly upset. On the second night, she said she didn’t love me anymore. I’m freaking out a bit – although I want to leave, due to COVID restrictions I can’t afford another round of expensive tests after such a short period, and I also feel so embarrassed that I’ve misread things badly enough to let it get to this point.

I’m trapped with the person I thought I would build my life with, and I don’t know what to do!

Yours truly,

Francophile Fool

 

 

Dear Francophile Fool.

First of all I want to congratulate you for making it work so long. Long distance is hard, Covid is hard! As to what’s happening right now however, take a moment to breathe. It sounds like you might be overreacting. What’s really wrong? Can’t you take not being the centre of attention for a moment? What did you expect from this, that it would be easy? That the house in the south of France (and listen to yourself – be thankful for what you do have!) would be a holiday, that you could be a balm to anyone? It sounds like it’s a good time to reconsider your expectations. Nothing good is ever easy. You need to stick it out and shut up, and wait for her to love you again. My honest advice is stop being a little ba----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------b----------------y---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------and to consider someone’s feelings other than y---------our o--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

I would eat myself if I could. Rather: if I weren’t a Man or had not those desires to possess, to persist – but I do, of course – I would be able to eat only myself, or the vision of myself in the shaft of light; velveteen with health, with those mild eyes like a deer, all knowing. The first bite reveals the packing peanuts inside, that’s the cellulite of my thighs, and the blood is the grey soap she makes from the ashes of the woodstove. It is useful and it melts after it’s done. I would eat myself and I would be nourished with it.

 

I am a Man; I eat her instead.

 

 

 

ACCOUNT OF THE FIRST DAY

It’s true that I was ashamed when I realised she did not love me, especially because I had suspected it already. Nevertheless I came with the last 3 bones of my little finger ready to be cut, to complete the ladder to her better self. (This last from a fairy-tale my grandfather read to me; the wife had to build to reach her husband trapped in a witch’s treetop lair but she was careless and lost those final essential rungs. No matter: she always has her body.)

 

I am a man. Our conversations only confirm my ferrous desire for power. No-one will take care of me and I cannot be a gracious patient. Turning to me with her oval face rigid as I tell her how she hurts me through indifference: I have it now, and I will never be able to give it up.

 

ACCOUNT OF A DAY LATER

Beautiful boy, she says, reaching out her hand to my jowls. I allow myself to believe that this is a spontaneous action on her part which I did not manipulate into happening, and in return for this kindness I study her eyes which take her face from prettiness to beauty. They are greenly shuttered at the back with pre-occupation which I want to scrabble at the door of.

The words have the same tone as to the dog, the beloved dog, the new dog that we’ve just started to live with, a being she can live with easily. She scrunches the hair behind my ear trying to find the touch along the skull bone there which I will enjoy, in the process uncurling the curls which I work to make natural and to form in a pretty manner. The words and gestures make my stomach fold with joy.

 

So: I am a Dog. I eat her body when the house is left locked from the inside.

 

In the car, driving down here, mad with unease, I made sure to rest my body in a charming way so when they looked back to find me asleep they would love me, would not be able to stop themselves from letting their hearts soften with how tender my neck looked, how sweet my sleeping. Often, I have come up against the knowledge that I give studied visions of my vulnerability to others, from above, a posed look into the queen’s chamber. The wounds are proof: shown so they would love me and trust my word. These amateur dioramas of the self count among my great shames and are as built into me as the green undertones of my skin in winter, as much of a necessary bordering as that great organ.

 

We sleep in the same bed. She tries to reach me but is muffled by her depression. She is not trying hard enough. My very hardest is a thorn underfoot, merely irritating. 

These thoughts follow each other like fungal hyphae. They do not end. They are not supposed to.

 

M-----, V-------; 2---

It will suffice to say a few words about the appearance of the great gape of the preceding events. It can be useful for other geologists to know what faults look like on the surface; not to facilitate attempts at prevention, for such things cannot and should not be prevented, instead, if I may be so bold, I sketch here where it happened because faults often occur in areas of exquisite beauty. Permit me the liberty of a digression.

It is an area which will be very hot later in the year but at the time of writing is visited by the mistral, the three day wind, le vent qui rend fou. While better observers have recorded the mistral, including the people at the foot of Mount Boron forty thousand years ago who built a low wall to protect their fire, I best can describe it as a rich constant sound, vaguely oceanic, but lacking the certitude of a constant direction. As such the walker is unwillingly compelled to turn the head behind to look for the pursuer, the moving beast, which is roaring directly in the ear. This presence whips up exposed skin, trees, farmhouses built too arrogantly to leave holes for the wind to pass through, and the fine sand with the same carelessness. Its function is to foster an attitude of humility and gratitude on its passing: that, and to allow one to scream directly into the air unheard.

Around the fault are vineyards which, in this early month, boast their bare black ribs of vines in curious parallel, especially when viewed on the move, slanting, colluding, parting. While plentiful, they are not of uncommon beauty for the region, especially as the local farmer has wrapped the dry soil in black plastic, since torn, lending an atmosphere of the escaped shroud. Dirtbike trails which could be hog trails cut sandy lines in the meagre forests.

The fault lies in the elbow of a brief green hill range ending in a medieval castle, the stone of which the visitor’s guide describes as tender. It is perfectly placed: the moon rises above it. Ancient bricks cross like fishbones and look kindly both ways, to the cemetery below and to the much more langorous L---- Valley,  satisfied with its reflection in the lazy river. Even that brief distance contains the world in it. It is a dry, rough, yellow place that can see lushness but does not possess it.  

 

Concurrent with the mistral, fine lit tips of wild asparagus wave through the brush, made of thyme, rosemary pine, sighing sweet scenes when disturbed and with a basenote of wild rocket. Bitter things yet lush. Dry things even without the heat to dry them.   

None of this is enough to evoke the absence, the passionate unfamiliarity to the visitor’s eye, the sense that everything is waiting behind the next ochre corner. It is possible and necessary to find a hole and wrap oneself there. I mention the wind first for obvious reasons, but even without it land as has just been described, gathering its energy for the season’s change, is common siting for a fault, and I suggest on your next expedition you reserve a day to explore and be wary of such locations. The earth can move whenever she desires: that is the only certainty.

 

 

ACCOUNT OF A WEEK LATER

Surprisingly I wake up first each morning out of all of us. There is so little time when I am unlooked at so I take it, 6:30am. Me and the new dog commiserating over a secret pot of strong coffee, and then we walk and he teaches me how to do that too. After waking myself roughly and beginning coffee this morning I see that he has shit extravagantly on the floor in the night, missing mine and her leather shoes narrowly. I realise belatedly that the crying we heard last night (that only I heard last night) was him warning us. I feel very guilty and I pace around not able to gather myself enough to begin the simple task of cleaning it (no-one is going to shout at anyone, it’s not even your dog, no-one will be angry).

She wakes to my touch on her shoulder and smiles to see me (we are doing better again), but I come with the bad news and a desperation outsize to the task.

Back in the kitchen I feel like it is disrespectful (but not disgusting – I love the dog and his corporeality like a baby) somehow to drink coffee in this midst, so I take him for a walk while she brings out the mop bucket as if she is still in her dream. She is loosely woven at the moment with her illness (my cause) but grows excellent, obedient and strong, when something must be done.

 

As the sprinklers arch over the corn just touching sun at the fingertips I realise why this thing is so painful.

When I last had a dog, she was a broken thing, you couldn’t see her straight on or predict her, she was a crab or a ghost in that white body. She loved us and hated the rest of us (Men). One time, my friend (Man) was dog sitting her and she had shat in fear in the corridor and stood over it snarling. My friend called me in cold anger and fear at 2am asking me to do something about it, and from Portugal in the little hotel I was apologising so deeply I would have died simply to get over it. For years afterwards this dog, dangerous even but touching and right angled with us, haunted and shamed me for this moment and for others, where she revealed that she was an animal we had not taken the patience to communicate with.  

Hooking the moments together just underneath the foam of my consciousness, the pattern of guilt forming uselessly and tenaciously. Because you didn’t stop it! Because you should have! There is always this sharp feeling when a conflict, the seed of it or the potting soil of it prepared, the fossil even, comes into view. Its power is enough to overwhelm the present. It’s a bad habit, my worst. I keep these thoughts to dogs for now because I do not want to think about the desperate guilt I hold for my parents’ relationship (or this one).

It’s a partial (psychoanalytic?) relief to note this all and to come back into the house.

 

 

ACCOUNT OF THE TIME AFTER

He smells delicious and carries no fleas, but he has ticks popping up each day like jewels on his blue white skin under the fur. Although the first tick was shocking, it is a pleasure now to search through with my fingers. A little primate instinct. Always I am astonished by his calmness when we wrench them out, for he trusts us so. On his ears, in his ears, the thin part of a leg where it is possible to pinch the fingers together between the bones.

 

I have eaten Myself. I am engaging in Simone Weil’s (Anne Carson’s), decreation, and at the borders I am gnawing to make some room.

“We should renounce being something. That is our only good… Every time we raise the ego (the social ego, the psychological ego etc) as high as we raise it, we degrade ourselves to an infinite degree by confining ourselves to being no more than that.”

(Of course she died so young, she was the snake and she ate herself up. Good for her.)

 

Outside each morning, I take her thick brown hair the same shade as mine and plait it into two braids. It could be maternal or sororal, but I feel it as simple material care without those tired familial analogies which can plague women who love women. We have discussed among us this conundrum many times, how to enter into more horizontal relations with others, especially care, the details of which elide you in the moment. You have to get out of yourself, is what I explain increasingly frantically. Everything is a fucking game.

In a different tone of voice: everything is a game! Which means we can take turns! Which means we can make mistakes! One possibility.

Ten days after I wrote the fourth paragraph of this thing, starting teeth bared and settling down now under a firm palm, it’s possible to pose that question without fatalism or rhetoric.

 

 -------------------

 

APPENDIX

The imprint of this document haunted me so I read it again the bit that was written inside my body and I said, I see. 

It is also telling that the only way I saw to escape was to destroy myself. Weil fucking died; she did not die as a metaphor but starved and coughed herself to death. And does this make her God?

 

A friend said, helpfully, upon hearing the news, that you can get attached to the relationship over the person. That is incorrect in this case. This whole business came about because she continues to be something I tear my hands to reach for. 

 

The soft animal of my heart is retiring and is being replaced with the bristly vermin of myself Soft animals do not exist they were invented by Mary Oliver to make us think that when others push it is meant to hurt And that wanting ever comes without reason There is no such thing as skin I have replaced it with a complex intestinal brushborder which picks up everything it touches for better or worse The word vulnerability implies that one could ever be invulnerable so I won’t use that there’s no off or on switch The bristles are a good beginning towards that understanding of compromise Bristle to protect us both Burr to catch me in the world Thorn to prevent being eaten again