THE FEAR OF AN ANONYMOUS EXISTENCE
 by Tonya Judy

Ottilia Kafka—Wednesday, 1910

I am alive. In my own ways and my own means. I am alive. Nothing I say or do now can take away the fact that through all of my trials and tribulations, I live. Amazing.

"Existence precedes essence"

I sit in comfort and discomfort in turns as I watch the simple way life has of plucking itself from my form. I possess a limitless well of knowledge and reckonings but can do nothing to stop the process of self-destruction. The ultimate question is why be given this ability if I can do nothing but eventually lose it. I sip a sea of infinitessence and can do nothing but bloat on its waters and die strangled in my glut.

I argue with storms on top of rain-dripping roofs and shout at ideas of gods and gargoyles. Neither comforts me. My anger knows no bounds and so collapses at the feet of anxiety. And so I still my anger in the quiet acceptance of a humble anguish. My heart and soul burn and pock with the acid and fire of these questions about existence and my mouth forms the perfect words of greeting and departure day in and day out. I eat, I sleep, I fuck and dream. I am alive.

"Anguish is the dread of the nothingness of human existence"

I question the right I might have to eat well. I wonder why I do it. I put the carrots in the sieve and warm the olive oil. I study grains and carbohydrates and fats and water intake and still I sneak a chocolate or scream over my vodka. Instead of puking out this affront to all of my assured love of self; I sniffle and snort over another glass and whore my heart.

I cry just to think of how useless a long life is. Is it only to make others feel its lack if it's been particularly sweet? What yearns to hold me eternal? Dark, deep earth. Should I make earth my lover then? Why wait? A real mystery is this: why do we acknowledge the futility in life and still continue to live? Am I deluding myself with the happiness I feel in a night camping alone, a lover's blue-eyed stare, a battle over a beastly fish won on a quiet lake?

"Absurdity"

Am I alone in wishing that my times of extreme forgetfulness will last? How do we humans do this? Living. We know that the treasures we have will fade so fast and we yearn to make something important happen but for what? We do not really know. It's na ve to assume that my bliss can ward off death. The first time I saw a dead body; I knew I'd never win against so cunning a foe.

"Nothingness or the void"

Grandma in purple. Purple aura before dying. So serene, this purple. I almost thought it was a good sign when I saw her aura. The day before she lost this life. Before dirt, roots and beetles could claim the strong form that had circled me with sustaining love and acceptance. Why had I been made to know this woman? Why know myself? Why not go about a life tasting the air with my tongue and seeking minerals and food with proboscis or rude tool?

"Death"

How can it mean anything to have been handed such a gift as understanding the cosmos, the human, the animals, the plants? How can any of that mean a damn thing? Should I know this all and simply turn a cold, blank stare to it as if I don't see it? Would I attain an enlightenment that would release me from the prison of my knowledge if I could blink out from under it?

What right does creation have to uproot me from stardust to toss me in with this insane batch of beings? How can I have ever been a fitting configuration of gas and particles when I have all of these questions within me. Leaving their imprint like a murder on house-paint. Am I the ghost of my former selves all yearning to slip a secret paper that details existence into my own pocket to end this infernal cycle of questioning?

I contemplate Pascal's words, as he's only just said them yesterday. I grow frightened with him. "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, and the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then." I am filled with dread and find that at least, there is company in dead philosophers.

Oh Pascal! Why are we made of heart and soul? Why do we light fires with mind and body? To what purpose are we made this way? When you puff out on a cosmic breeze, think of me kindly and maybe help that ghost-note-passing along a bit, will you? Pascal can't help me now. The irony of this fact is killing me.

Freedom to Choose

What am I choosing? I'm wracked with a feeling like no other I've known. I've kissed a Turkish man at a dance-club. His hands did me in. I was taken in by their unnatural beauty. He doesn't believe a word I say as I gaze at them longingly and feel myself circled by his warm body in a crisp, white dress shirt. He's too thin but tall and I feel the angles of his pelvic bones gently push into my stomach as I notice Emilie sees all of this.

She's been talking to a French man in the corner under a flashy sign. I've been haunting the Turk's field of vision all night hoping he'd notice me noticing his hands. Though, I can't imagine really why I am doing this as my boyfriend, Burtholdt, has just gone to get me a glass of wine. I choose to kiss this Turkish man under dim light with Burtholdt just around the corner, talking to the band leader about tonight's music. Another of Burtholdt's dim conversations and my first dimly lit kiss in 4 long years. Until this past weekend, I would drool over this kiss.

I can feel Emilie judging me and it burns my neck a little. I wish that she'd be a good friend and watch the door for me. I wish that she'd get with who I am and just know what to do. I wished that the Turk would get his hands out of my shirt before I would have to jump away from him and around the corner to get by myself and breathe. But then, Burtholdt would be there. And he'd expect a greeting and for me to take my wine. He'd expect me to listen for 20 minutes as he described his whole boring conversation with the band leader. I'd swallow the passion and think of the Turk's hands and his taste and Emilie's look of judgement. I'd worry.

I woke up with that kiss.

There were many near-waking dreams with dances at the Jamaican bar up in the thighs of men who were strange to me but who could dance when Burtholdt would not. Men who slipped me numbers and kisses on the neck and sighs into my ears. Men who pushed the tip of their decision making sticks into my rear as music made us shimmy and step close and then away. Men.

Now, there is last weekend. I listen to Burtholdt and think of how I can end things between us. We have been living together for five very long years. I've swallowed so much of what I think is important that I'm not sure if I'm even here anymore. I look into the eyes of people who meet me looking for a glimpse of what I am. I only know that I'm alive.

"Alienation or estrangement"

Last weekend, I chose to sleep with Johann. I treasured his wild ideas and his craziness even as I thought of others in our company who knew I have my boyfriend, Burtholdt. I always am followed by a chorus. They sing judgement and keep silent. It unnerves me but I am persecuted most strongly by myself. I live with all of these desires and wants and needs and feel so stifled. I sip at that sea and wonder if I just drink more, I will bloat less and so won't die strangled by my glut.

If I drink more of Johann. If I drink more passion and desire and expression will I pass the waters of the sea of infinitessence freely? Or will I drown the people around me? Don't they know who I am? Does Burtholdt look into my eyes and feel loved? I ask him that all of the time. I don't touch him much. I don't seek out intimacy with him. I think of him as my best friend, my buddy. He ignites no passion in me but we are together.

My greatest fear realized: I am living an anonymous existence . We are simply together. We don't share interests. He doesn't know my heart, my soul or my desires. He doesn't know my fears. He only knows that he thinks I'm pretty and that he can talk to me. He talks at me. He has no idea what my favorite color is, why I am an insomniac, my secret trespasses against our presumed existence go unaccounted for.

I am alive. But am I alive? Isn't this life just the shed-skin of a real life? I am a withered, dried husk that smoothes my form with oils and quick-talking to keep up an allusion for myself in all of my fear. I'm so afraid of banking on myself that I forget how young I am.

The Turkish man and Johann and the thighs of men in Jamaican bars won't save me. So, I create a pasture on which to graze my knocked-about self. Camus would have me creating art but I just think of my mental farm. I water my self and milk my self and fleece my self and pluck my self eternally.

Franz Kafka—Thursday, 1912

This story, "The Judgment," I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during the night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the ante-room for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day. The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters' room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, "I've been writing until now." The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul. Morning in bed. The always clear eyes. Many emotions carried along in the writing, joy, for example, that I shall have something beautiful for Max's Arkadia, thoughts about Freud, of course; in one passage, of Arnold Beer; in another, of Wasserman; in one, of Werfel's giantess; of course, also of my "The Urban World."

As I read the story aloud, I noticed that Ottilia timidly tucked a packet of papers into a folder and placed this underneath her clumpy mattress.

Franz Kafka—Friday, 1912

I could hardly wait until Ottilia had left the house on another of her absolutely stubborn errands. No one really knows where she goes. I shuffled into her bedroom and shyly told the maid that I was just retrieving my book on Matteo Ricci. I'd been writing a play for my sisters on palaces of memory and how Matteo laid out so plainly the way it was to be accomplished. I felt a fool. I know that. She just nodded at me and asked if she could dust my room while I was busy.

I deposited myself on Ottilia's worn bed and retrieved the packet of papers from underneath her mattress. A diary!

Dear Max, please destroy this excerpt from her diary. I stole this. She was only 18. How could she know how this information would affect me? My theories on life and living.

Destroy it all!

© Tonya Judy 2001

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