Mini Essay, Playlist: Non-Attachment (The Void) by Imogen Staines

IMOGEN STAINES - 9 MAY 2021

Non-Attachment (The Void)

25/04/21

You can’t keep him.

It took a lot to learn that, and then some more. I don’t know why, but it’s always been ‘him’. Non-attachment is for the boys, or so the void tells me. For some reason, women stick around. My women do, anyway. They’ve always been there for me, ever-present ports in my eternal storm. But I know you can’t keep her either.

‘He doesn’t understand you,’ I was told. Oh.

I was just trying to get myself, and that was proving to be much harder than anticipated. Maybe that’s why he didn’t understand me. (Try harder, then). He did try harder, actually; he bought a book. Somehow, that made it worse. And it still makes me cry.

So, yeah, I tried to keep him first, on my terms. And my terms caused problems. 10-year-old lungs full of the smog of anxiety. 10-year-old eyes full of tears. Short of breath. No sleep. My fault.

I stopped talking to him. It was only going to be until he stopped drinking, cos I heard that was what was messing us up. Lost patience looks like distance and sounds like silence. But it feels like TV static on full blast. Abrupt. Unrelenting. Fucking loud. Nothing absent about it.

When he stopped talking to me, it was final. Quick too - even now, my neck still twinges a bit from the whiplash if I pay close enough attention. No more phone calls, no more Sleeping Satellite.

In 2014, I tried CBT to stop thinking about him all the fucking time. It worked pretty well, actually. I think part of what I needed was the permission to let him go. He never goes too far, anyway, it turns out.

Some people only need to be in your life for a short time (physically). Does it sound like I learned something? Well, you’ll never guess what - the void came back when I was 22. It was a little more familiar this time, so when it whispered, ‘You can’t keep him,’ I said, ‘I know!’

But behind the void’s back, I thought to myself, ‘Maybe this time I can. What the void doesn’t know can’t hurt it, right?’ Turns out that’s not the point, but we’ll get to that later.

It’s hard to talk about the void’s second visit, so please forgive my brevity.

22 to 25: I lost my soul to attachment and became addicted to self-censorship. Everything turned beige and flat as I steadily robbed myself of dimension (and not just by using a Shiseido foundation one shade too dark). I was always about to do something wrong. Sometimes I got further than ‘about to’.

We were just husks of humans destroying each other. And I still can’t read those texts.

When Democritus said, ‘Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul,’ I felt that.

The void came back recently. I’m just letting it do its own thing.

Third time lucky.

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