The existential lack you wake up with is real enough. The thing you fill it with is not. The thing, whether object or being has no substance. You look and see and desire and look to another to know what it is you should desire and it is all helium. Up it goes, no hanging on or retrieval. But you tell yourself the romantic lie that in fact you did hang on and that it is now what is filling you and giving you your bit of buoyancy. And without knowing what you’re doing you add to the lie by convincing yourself that if only you could acquire a bit more of whatever that was, you would finally satisfy that deficiency and come into yourself discovering your trueness. And without knowing you’re doing it you cast about to see who it is that is leading the fulfilled life and seize upon your neighbour three doors down. Your neighbour two doors down you know well enough to conclude he has his own problems. In fact one time you caught him giving you the envy-eye so you know his environ is a dead end. But she, of the next-door-to-the-two-doors-down looks altogether put together. She had seemed average enough but you caught something else, something more the day you passed her on the sidewalk outside your office. What was it you wonder? You catch yourself looking for an answer but not really looking and not conscious that you’re looking yet one morning at 3:30 AM you wake up and wonder what kind of salad she eats. What’s her breakfast? She might as well have her own line of clothes, fragrance, hair products, so well is she pieced and plaited! Where did she find her poise you wonder? What’s her regime? Her program? Her magazines? Yes, obviously, she lacks the lack you wake up with. Can’t be. Can it? It is! Has her own line of clothes? Silly! Go back to sleep! You press all this down far under the threshold of awareness from where it came and you get on with your day. Except without knowing it you allow the play of the romantic lie and you make little raids on the inarticulate something that tells you of her preeminence. And now you move beyond her surface to the substance of things and consider her friends, her intimacies–yes, of course hers are the right friends and intimacies and soulish powers and here lies her secret. But just how did she acquire them? No, that’s the wrong question…she has them…how do you get them? Now we’re getting someplace. And then the conclusion comes naturally enough, almost divine in its revelatory shimmer with you self-possessed and in control of your innocent desires not trying to evince a solution in any way, and now you know that in order to be yourself it’s her being you must possess. And so in every way you must kill her off. Your existential completeness is just that close. Three doors down. This is your awakening that you remain unaware of.
