Elliot

I have felt a cavity in my heart for as long as I can remember, a loneliness that seems to eat away at itself, to feed on its own emptiness and grow wider over time. For a while, growing up, I believed that this vacancy I felt was only temporary, a hole that one day might be filled in and made complete by some other human being, philosophy, or way of life. Now, I know better. The felt absence inside me is something more or less permanent, a condition of my existence, a component of my self that I have now consciously grafted to my identity and tried my best to make peace with.

How I became like this, always searching for something, never feeling like the elements and people around me were ‘enough’, I don’t know. Yet, I can guess at the 'how', life grants us that, and I have often tried, with a mathematical vigor, to figure myself out. 

When I was a kid my father would often beat me with a black belt, leaving me with bruises on my back, arms, and tender behind. On top of this tradition, which he had diligently inherited and passed down from his own father, he would indoctrinate me with biblical narratives on a daily basis that, ironically, I found did more harm to my chance at happiness than the beatings. I would go to school in my long-sleeved uniform, wearing it even in the summer when the unbearable heat came in order to cover my bruises, and I would tell all my classmates about Jesus and hell. These physical and spiritual marks that I bore naturally and inevitably garnered me mockery and disdain from my peers, who’s parents had blessed with enough ideological freedom to become socially adapted to the diversity of opinion in school, in society. And so it was that the tabula rasa of my childhood identity swiftly became a monochrome Jackson Pollock, splattered with the powerful hereditary and environmental forces that compelled me, from the start, to struggle in my perennial search for human connection. I became a loner early on in this way, feeling a growing alienation that would gradually become a deeper theme underlying my life. My isolation became normal; sooner or later I stopped questioning it.

But the vacancy I felt was more than the sense that I was a social accident, and so it remained in my consciousness beyond my childhood. It was a grand dissatisfaction with the possibilities available to me in the century and cosmos I had found myself in – and a frustration with the failure of everyone around me to see and feel any semblance of ennui. This feeling caused a restlessness in me that began to tear at my adolescence, and soon severed me from my family. I still remember the day I realized that I was bigger and stronger than my father. I had looked at my hands after chopping wood for our fire, a chore he’d made me do ever since I could lift a hatchet with two hands, and had discovered them to be large, powerful hands, wonderfully capable of reciprocating violence, especially the unjust outbursts of my father. But I loved my father deeply, in spite of the rage he incited in me almost every second I was home, and so in my unrest I decided to leave. It seemed to me mature at the time, the only option that would keep me from realizing my strength against him, and one that might launch me into more interesting life trajectories. I had been to the edge of my town before but was forbidden to go further - it seemed only natural that out there, beyond those arbitrary lines, lay something or someone waiting to change my life. I was right.

I packed my bags in secret that week, and left as soon as I found the house empty – I was fifteen at the time. I left nothing, except for all my photographs and a note for my mother, saying that I would be away for a while, that I loved her, that I hoped she would save money for my brother to go to college one day, and that she didn’t need to worry about me. I had no idea that this last demand, aimed to comfort her, was entirely impossible for her.

I spent most of my teenage years as a lost nomad – I left rural Germany, which of course I had never even explored let alone been outside of in my life, and traveled as far away from my family as I could imagine, which to my small brain then meant the United States. When I arrived I had just less than two hundred euro, a deteriorating backpack, and a sense that the world was about to open up for me. It did not immediately do that. Or, it did, but in a rougher way than I had envisioned – I found a job in a pizza shop in Manhattan, a place that felt like the future to me, but only managed to survive by associating with the youth of my age in the area, many of whom belonged or had friends who belonged to gangs. I don’t remember much of this time, just that I was coked up for most of it, was involved in a stabbing two times (one of which had me on the receiving end – I still have the scars), and went hungry more than I like to remember. Beyond my economic dissatisfaction, I grew tired of the hood culture, which seemed basic to me, a justice predicated on clout and Hammurabi’s code, which I found easy enough to navigate but not enduringly interesting. By the time I was 19 I had saved enough to get the fuck out of there, and so I left my home for the second time with virtually no idea where I was going.

Somehow I ended up studying for and getting my GED, even though I’d never stepped foot in a school since year eight. I discovered that I had a love for academics, and a knack for it too –it addressed some kind of need in me, to know how things worked, to become more than I was by what I came to know. And so, GED in hand, I decided to send applications to a few universities, in the hope that I might be able to continue this newfound intellectual joy.

It turned out that every school I applied to liked my story, the story of my life, thought I was a singular and remarkable case of untapped and underprivileged potential, or something along those lines, and so I found myself in the fortunate position of choosing between three exceptional schools. In the end I chose to attend Yale, in New Haven, which was not very far from where I had been and made me feel comfortable financially. Yale would be my first experience of higher education.

When I got there, of course, I was delightfully overwhelmed by the new minds and facilities that I suddenly had access to. I felt like I had been somehow wholly promoted, that my socioeconomic position had been erased and rewritten by benevolent gods and that by this strange turn of fate I had now been placed near the top of the book of life, with the world at my fingertips. Yet this feeling was bound to the nascence of everything I was experiencing; soon my emptiness and boredom returned, as it always had, as it always would. By the end of my freshmen year I had grown tired of the students around me – they seemed vapid, taken up too easily by simple ideas, convinced of mundane political and cultural theories, unwilling to break out of the populism they found themselves in. I began to think of leaving Yale the following year, and may have left even before then had I not attended a post-exam party in May of that year, and met Sophia.

It was she who showed me that there were others out there similar to me, feeling the restlessness that I felt. Sophia’s was a more public impulse, but it was there – I could see it in her eyes when I first saw her, compelling her to transcend the cards she had been dealt, to wander beyond them. I had situated myself in the bathroom line, half drunk and mostly bored, getting ready to hit the library soon after taking a leak. I found her, two people in front of me, an unutterably beautiful senior, staring at the wall. I was struck by something beyond her overt beauty, and realized I needed to reveal to her my existence. When I moved past the pawns in front of me all I said was, you have beautiful lips, but I knew it was enough. I walked away before she could respond.

But our next meeting was what excited me. It was at another party a month later, a girl had begun kissing me in the corner of the hall, and I had chosen not to protest. I didn’t notice her, but suddenly she was in front of us, coiling back like a cobra. I stopped moving my mouth and looked over – immediately, I was greeted by her fist, which struck me as hard as any punch I’d felt on the streets of Manhattan, and just like that I fell in love with her. How could I not? As soon as I realized what had happened I was transfixed by her rage, and withdrew into myself in delight of her passion. Rage so strong and so public evidenced bravery, I concluded, and her bravery revealed greatness, and all of it spoke of an unending reservoir of emotion inside of her wanting to be tapped, uncovered, and mixed with my own. Our relationship did not last; she could not control herself in more important ways than physical, she drank too much, she forgot things, became needy, and I slowly found that I could figure her out like I could most people. I didn’t think of her much afterwards, though sometimes at night I did miss her. I always remembered the feeling of her fist, and the revelations it gave me, very fondly. That is love, I thought.

Nothing happened for a long time. I studied, improved my grades from A’s and B’s to straight A’s, forgot about Sophia, become reacquainted with my void, and read more books than I ever had in my tortured effort to fill it. I had no friends then and preferred it that way, thankful that I didn’t have to listen to the kind of drivel I always heard in the cafeteria – I had Plato, I had Goethe, I had Wallace – these and others were my friends and confidants, and I did not wish to replace them. My sophomore year at Yale flew by quickly, and I was learning at such a pace that, although I felt the monotony of my routine viscerally, I was OK with my lifestyle, sensing it watering my brain and growing it rapidly. In other words, I did not expect my junior year to change at all. I liked what I was doing, and was content for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever.

But life had something else in store for me. I knew nothing of it then, but a storm was brewing on my horizon and was about to break into my life in the form of a man. I had not met him yet, my dear Elliot, but the storm he brought with him would change both of us forever. He would be dead in less than six months and I - shattered and taken up by the torrent - I am still unsure whether I will make it out.

Let me tell you what I mean: