Experience taught me that the end of a relationship normally brings about a temporary erasure of identity––one literally loses track of who they are since they have lost touch with the object of their attraction, the object that reflected them back onto themselves for however long the relationship lasted.
(This is also why it is so tricky to understand whether you loved that person or yourself, or whether there is a difference to be indicated there at all.)
But experience has taught me something else as well––that there is a subtle transference in this brutal cut-off: sometimes the fated two, the separated, take with them the characters of one another; the two, going their separate ways, carry the other’s personality, at first like a corpse, then like a friend, and maybe in the end like a part of themselves.
This can be thought of as the final affliction, a theft.
Maybe the pain of ending a relationship is not so much the pain of losing the other, but of losing yourself as you appeared to that other––being left with nothing but that other, their voice, their thoughts, resonating through and over your own.
Maybe the pain of separation is just the pain of encounter.
idiotic investigations 