by Tal Brott

So creative is his obsession, he could even divine some connection to her in this sentence.

He often closes his eyes and sees her in three dimensions with a clarity that exceeds that if she were right before him, because his mind’s eye doesn’t have the refractive aberrations of air to distort her form. In fact, if he were to actually see her, he would be both shocked and repulsed at the stunning inaccuracies that her actual form embodies. Reality is such a lie in all its impurities.

It is only her smell that he can’t reproduce. Eyes closed, he tries to evoke her odour, he sometimes may catch a fleeting glimpse of scent that is almost exactly like her smell, but like an elaborate elusive dream forgotten on awakening, it’s frustratingly fucked off.

When he meets women now, he immediately sees how hopelessly flawed they are by the very deviations that compare to the woman that left him. She is a template that hovers above, then overlays every person he meets. The most horrible women of all are the ones that are almost like her. Because they are a sad, twisted caricature of something perfect. They offer a mocking reminder of what he once thought he had.

His understanding of her is completely removed from who she really is. He has mapped a fantasy person onto her that is not even she. So even she is an impostor of who he thinks she is.

He has become a mono-dimensional being. He has channelled all the shades of complexity a man can have into one terrifying fixation that has compressed his character into a sliver, a huge two-dimensional plane that rotates and when we see it’s profile edge, it disappears, it’s vastness vanishing into void.

He blocks from his mind the times spent with her. Why spoil the memory by placing her into the context of a relationship or experience? Her behaviour, feelings, self and spirit were never indicative of her anyway. She was superior to all that. Better she be an abstract entity, a pure platonic form. She is a sphere. A pyramid. A cube. Timeless.

One day he will write a story about it, and by ‘story’ he really means a kind of pretentious character study. But by then she has long since forgotten him. She grows old gracefully, a lioness surveying the land protecting her cubs, surrounded by the legacy of her loins and beyond. While he is alone and destitute, desperately trying to fabricate memories of memories, a withering trace of a trace, dying concentric circles rippling out into nothing.

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