Kissing Frogs

I got the email out recently. I had been struggling with re-writes for the book and I suddenly felt a need to inflict a bit of pain, open a vein, let some of the initial shock and hurt loose to act as a trigger to move the writing on. Why do I keep it, I don’t know. Perhaps it is because it’s one of the few tiny bits of evidence I have that he is real and not a character I wrote. The email, the drunken conversation on LinkedIn and the videos. That’s it, that’s all. It amounts to very little for a person who has been a constant and relentless presence.

I have been reading about limerence and the Limerent Object, the LO, in an attempt to understand what it is that I am experiencing. It’s a slippery subject and not easy to define, and people have tried, do try. It’s been described as attachment disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, a manic form of love, delusion. Is it some sort of mental imbalance needing treatment? It is generally agreed it’s some form of infatuation, an intense feeling of love that becomes addictive with constant intrusive thoughts about the LO. Romeo and Juliet are a classic example. I danced around with the idea for a while wondering if it could be used to explain my need to make real the ESL. It isn’t that though, it is about being erased, that all the time we spent together, and we did spend time together, has, for him, apparently been deleted, expunged. It is the sense of erasure that rattles and shakes the inside of my head. Of course there are all sorts of people in our lives who pass through who we don’t remember clearly, who were just extras, had walk on parts, but do we completely forget those we were intimate with for months? Maybe it is unethical amnesia, dissociation, minimisation of being unfaithful. We both told a lot of lies. Useful to take a pair of scissors to those and cut them out. In some ways it doesn’t matter what the label for it is, what matters is the feeling of being invisible and I need to be visible.

Memories, how we remember, who we remember and the effects different people have on our lives, is at the heart of the book, The Playhouse, as is the way we present ourselves to the world, the different personas we create for ourselves, the stories we tell. Pirandello wrote about it, as have others, in One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. The masks we have and the impossibility of a single identity, particularly now in the age of the internet where you can be anything you want to be, and AI, well, that will take it to whole other levels. It’s also about how one person can upend you, how you chose them rather than the better option. The reasons they are the wrong person could be a chapter in a book, there are so many of them. Everything, logic, common sense, argues against the choice of this one person. And, yet, desire, which has no time for whether this or that person is good for you, fixes itself in the body and replacements are not an option.

The book re-writes mean that the character, my ESL, who is at the heart of the story now having inserted himself on a beach in France, has to undergo some major changes to meet what will satisfy the ‘legals’. He needs to be rewritten to be unrecognisable to both himself and anyone who might know him. In that process all the real, messy, complicated reality gets lost. Yet, perversely, it reflects the theme of the multiplicity of who we are, how we construct ourselves daily to be the person other people expect to show up or who we want them to believe we are.

All this rewriting takes its toll though and thins the rawness and honesty it once had, trying to capture that in a different way is exhausting and feels, in may ways, impossible.