K showed up wearing a new Alexander McQueen belt. (Everything else he had on was dumpy, but his belt was nice.) He refused to look at me or even talk to me. He smelled good, but he was in pain.
K liked pain. He devoted himself to it. The things he did to his body, the things he did to mine–pain was his “affective medium,” as he put it once in that way he puts things. But this pain was different. There was no pleasure here–aesthetic, sexual, whatever. What he was now experiencing was the dull, throbbing pain of heartache, the kind of pain that has no purpose, the selfish kind of pain that is only of and for itself.
He might later tell himself that he will learn from this pain, that it has taught him to never get involved with someone like me again, or that it has taught him things about himself because if he wasn’t how he is none of this would have happened. So it is not pain without purpose, after all, he might tell himself.
But that would require him to speak.
And I need to leave soon. I have things to do.
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