Humor: If Roland Barthes Had Written “A Lover’s Discourse” About the Guy I’m Hooking Up With
by Mitali Desai
On Longing:
Though the cloud of Juul vapor obscures the object, on the other side I come into being as a subject in the mirage of my own desire. Cotton candy, strawberry, sour apple—the scent of memory, of childhood, the sweet aroma before the first heartbreak: being torn from my mother’s breast.
On The Fluid Exchange:
In our amorous dance, we are becoming and (un)becoming. The spit that falls from the lips of my lover falls in perpetuity. My mouth, the receptacle. We gesture, glance, wink, renege, sigh, fall. I say, “Babe, I thought we talked about how I don’t love when you do that”—but to spit in my mouth is to give me the gift of language, or something? It is the speech act that creates and disrupts our covenant? [Searle]
On Longing II:
[Freud] Through the smoke—the “Supreme” logo. Logo…logos? Supreme—in the kingdom of man, what reigns supreme? The story, my lover’s story, the story of being cleaved from that which constitutes the self- [Plato] Plato’s hermaphrodite, torn in two, my lover and his muse.
On Coming to the Show:
The show—from the Old English, to look at, inspect. My lover asks me if I will come to the show, he requires me to see him, to be seen, to imagine him into being. At the show we must not speak, for he must speak to his friends, les amis. Our silence creates the bond between us, a bond that cannot be challenged even when Caroline, that girl in the white Vans, touches my lover’s tattoo. Certainly our silence is strong, magnetic…fuck Caroline. [Caroline] My lover cannot come to my work thing, but surely he has reason—for love itself is work. [Gibran]
On Power:
My lover explains—for he knows more than I, in the sense that, like, we always encounter the other as the unknown—that Andrew Yang [Yang] has made some good points. Point: to guide toward, the climax, which speaking of, it’s been a while (see The Fluid Exchange), but time is of no consequence to the lover borne of Waiting.
On Kinship:
[Mother] Why couldn’t Josh come tonight?
Someone tells me this kind of love is not viable. Oh, sweet mother. I am of you and yet distinct, there is no means for us to resew the stitches that pulled us apart when I fell from you. Josh needs some space, because he is going through a thing [Tolstoy] which he can only remedy [Kant?] through jamming with the boys. The boys, in a stunning coincidence (fate sings us her fury) are always on the same street as Caroline’s place [Find my Friends] (oh, to be found!), but, like, I’m not going to be weird about it, for I shall not fall prey to the fruitless rage of the lover who mourns what is not yet lost.