11-26-21
Duncan Hall was someone who only orbited my life briefly, but still found a way to make his incision.
He continually would drift away then find some new, benign-seeming way to insert himself back into my life, a response to one of my querries on the email-forums of my small college. Then asking about me, my break. Querries unrealted to him. That he had no business replying to. In a 1-2 rythm, once before each break he returned, bridging my singular brush with him as more than just a passer-by. Maybe it’s self-centered to perceive it that way, but that’s how well all percieve life: with ourselves at the center of it all. Ourselves our central node of action and reaction, the only real point of feedback we have.
I was left percieving him through second-hand messages. Left constructing what his actions might mean from the smaller sum of his words.
Becasue he had a way of saying things without really saying anything at all. We could talk for hours about the number of selves contained in the mind, the meaning contained in the space between the end of one breath and the start of the next, and all the while, he could never allow himself to be contained by another person with any more committment than the start and end of a conversation.
As I left his suite lounge that night, I knew he had left too many signals unanswered, that my hope of him as more-than-a-friend or even as more than a mere spectre on the lanscape on my life would also, likely, be unanswered. But I allowed myself to be bouyed along by hope that had already seeded, nurtured by other words and actions, before the pulling-back, before I got close enough to see the fissures beneath the surface, the ones of the sort we all keep behind our smiles for strangers.
I, also, had the chance to percieve him through second-hand stories.
A friend of a friend was his girlfriend, on-and-off, bridging, reaching to either side of whatever was – or wasn’t – with me.
One night, a singular day before Valentine’s day, a symbolic holiday with no appartent purpose but to catalyze romantic reactions – towards their beginnings or ends, Duncan Hall stopped me in the stairwell to address my open-book eyes, my open-book attitude, my open-book crush on him. He told me that everything was breaking apart and that he had no idea when it would come back together. I think, now, I could diagnois his particular disease as the age of 23. In the moment, though, I thanked him for his honesty.
Three weeks later he was with her again.
She, too, loved his philisophical bent. Who knew, what an aphrodasiac topics of existentialism or the nature of self could be. Maybe if the secret got out, more guys would be philosophy majors.
But hearing her story makes me wonder what it actually means to be with someone. Where do we draw this imaginary line? With a kiss? With sex? When we have seen certain amounts of each others’ naked flesh?
Yes, she was with him physically but his resistence to closeness of other kinds, of being contianed by another person, remained.
They got high together one night. That’s when he told her. Told her he couldn’t be contained anymore. He probably had good reasons, good excuses, good coverups from the rational mind. But then again, we always do when we’re running away from fear.
She texted her friend, my friend one line.
This was a mistake.
Nihilistic Porcupine 