On Touch

Loss And Game of Thrones

Part one of a four-part series about…touch?

I think I might be a ghost and that’s what’s making it so hard to write. I’ve just finished the second draft of a memoir. It feels like I’ve written my entire life out of me, like all that remains is the absence of something, a series of thin lines and wavering shadows outlining the space where my self used to be.

I don’t know that this is a problem. It’s actually kind of nice. Of what use is a self in a world like the one we now have, I can’t help but wonder — a world where each moment seems to carry with it the vague stench of death, where we are witnessing the hasty collapse of a society. Not the end of the world, not the collapse of a government, which, to be fair, is doing exactly what it was meant to do, just a steady breaking down of collective social contract. Put simply, put non-politically, I am living in a time in which every day I witness someone turning their back on the suffering of someone else and it hurts. It hurts because I’m afraid it will be me — the person who is suffering and the person who is turning their back — they might both be me. They both already are.

I struggle to hold on to a sense of humanity, or a sense of presence, like I’m actually here right now, probably because “actually here right now” is sometimes overwhelming and exhausting and irritating and frightening.