In Which I Employ Skilful Means to Explain my Silence

I had no reason to return here save the most unlikely one. Someone I have never met or spoken to asked me to write again, and I felt that if I had ever needed an impetus to break my silence, this was it. You understand of course, that a silence cannot be explained in words. A silence simply is. It is absolute, not a lack of.

The reason I could not write in the past year was in fact a chimera of reasons:
I was happy.
So happy that I was afraid to close my eyes and reflect on the past even for a moment lest I open them to find that the present had turned into ash and needed to be tapped into a dusty bowl.

I was angry.
Our month of absolute togetherness had been nothing but a tantalizing glimpse of the way our lives could be, maybe a million years from now, provided we survived the onslaught of of uncertainty, doubt, distance, time and other villains that haunt the paths of lovers. I missed it more than I cared to acknowledge, and decided that it would be best to seal the memory away in a jar of brine for another day.

And finally, I was saving up all my words and energy for the dissertation that I had dreamt of writing all my life, or at least for the last five years. I needed to be silent so that when the time came I could produce thirteen thousand words filled with love anger hate sex fear submission and revolt.
In the nascent stages, when I had just begun to read all that I would eventually write about, I met a man in a dusty sunlit library who proceeded, without much ceremony to strip me bare and whisper things to me that I had only dared to imagine in the deepest recesses of my mind. He spoke to me of violence and shame and the look of the other that reduces one to becoming an object. Of the pleasure to be sought in the pain of being a mere thing, and the core of nothingness which pulsated within all of us.
I met his lover, who soothed my shock at his words while she taught me how I could use that nothingness to conquer being. It was a tense, interlocked ménage à trois. Sartre, Beauvoir and I trapped in a tiny room for three months. At the end of the ordeal, all else seemed trite and insignificant and completely coloured by the words of those two.The depravity of their union, which seduced multitudes before me and will continue to do so forever, gave words and form to a paradigm shift which had already begun to bloom within me.
I fear now that the dissertation was only the beginning of our degenerate affair. They have taken up permanent residence in my mind.

So I finally stepped forth from the gates that had held me in for five years, and just as he had predicted, the weight of my freedom crippled me with anguish. I dimly recalled whizzing past a church one summer afternoon and reading a bizarrely masochistic message on the prayer board:

"True freedom exists in His bondage alone."

I was free of my bonds. From this moment on, there was no predetermined pattern of events that would lend meaning to my existence while I proudly proclaimed this is not who I am, I am more than this, I transcend my facticity.
From this moment on, I am exactly what I choose to become.