Obtuse and opaque.

Always say yes...
— Stephen P. (@mysonabsalom) May 21, 2013

I can only manage obtuse, opaque writing about the last week. The odd sensation that everyone is watching. This blog is the perfect alibi: hide in plain sight.

I'm embarrassingly in search of a theory of everything -- the search, a kind of vestigial organ of my Evangelical faith. I want truth: I want to know the one cause, but if I've learned anything, it's this: there is never, not ever, never one cause. Instead, there are causes, an endless list of causes and when you think you have identified them all, you have only identified the identifiable ones. How many unknown unknowns lurk just beyond your perception. Many more than you think, I'm sure.

Maybe this truth, embodied in the entropy of our terrace house: left alone, everything gathers dust.

All the objects, some material, some immaterial, remind me of being alone. The house, the emptiness, is hot when I come home late from working later than I would have otherwise, but there are no sticky hands to grab onto me when I open the door so I put it off as long as I can. I left the fan on yesterday: I had spent the night in the city again, in a guest room in KL, but I fell asleep alone. Another empty cavernous house, with heavy wood chairs. I woke suddenly, reaching across the bed for my wife's absent body. 

A truth: you can never sleep in the middle of a bed. You always favour one side, subconsciously leaving space for another.

Or this: you will always talk about what matters to you most, despite where you are and who you're with. Empirical evidence: a view of the city from a condo in Bangsar, all these people I don't deserve to be sitting with. Suddenly, I catch myself talking about my children. If I had pictures in my wallet, I would make everyone look at them.

In my theory of everything, I think there are no exceptions to this rule: never say no to sitting with people who know more than you.

Or this truth: life with others is always better than life alone. Not always. Most of the time. A majority of the time.

Another day passes: Yoko will not be home again. Yoko, the woman I love: of course distance reminds you what you know, what your body already knows. I love you, stay with me, I wrote once in a poem voicing Bahktin's longing for his own wife. I am so sick with love.

Love might be a theory of everything: I warn myself again and again, Never tell the truth; serve the narrative. The narrative will eventually become the truth.