Crescent
Slow down, speed up
Morning waits, foamed and bittersweet. From a squinting corner, blooming white cotton catches on my neurons reserved for impracticality. All the usual parched directives were aboard; be restrained, be small, don’t disturb. But she entered with sleeves too wide for coat sleeves and a cough too delicate to name, laying down yellow legal pads like a field of trust.
Like marbles, she rolls me personal questions. I try to answer without cracking, offering softened truths, polishing the envy until it looks like admiration. She speaks of how she wishes she still had her command. We curve around each other, careful not to press too hard. Word and gesture separate from here on out. A brief uncoiled ache flips back into place like a curl.
Keep listening. I know a little about what comes hammering after mimicking the visitor at the mind's door. Full and ripe arterial paths experience a sudden pressure surge. Protective beads of sweat chalk the skin, cheeks blushing with unspent blame. Despite my best efforts, that redness never gets enough airtime to dull itself. Signs of life rip in places that do not make amends.
Two opposing poles sharing one fate: both structured by a projected other. One cut out from the beginning and one cut to decline. Faced with a silverback moon, our years feel sewn together by the faded threads of repetition.
Lacan’s objet petit a marks the sliver between states—a shape-shifting remainder that refuses naming, ownership, or coherence. It is the trace of absence itself: done, undone, not done, or done too well. Transition, not transformation. That fragment of becoming which slips through any attempt to possess it.
Objet a doesn’t fulfil; it provokes. It adopts movement without resolution, letting the iambics play. Never whole, never mirrored. Passivity, multitudinous now, corrodes control in time. Desire twists in its own slipstream, promising not satisfaction, but the echo of a shape. From opposite sides of the room, one watches the waning, the other wills the waxing. Of the two, one is defeated. A collision that favours theirs, perhaps, for options being limited; mine, perhaps, for organising depth around emptiness.
Deep in the fjord of suspended time, interest in others doesn’t cancel out self-absorption. The nature of this alternate object, which would satisfy the desire, is a convulsion, not a source. The host readies itself to expel, to set its imposed groove. The rush is the body, always responding to lack, playing out the fantasy of a landing place that never arrives. My longing has mass, but no coordinates. The same build, muscling, and poise. Still, I’m told I have only a surface-level understanding of things.
Shifting centres resist conclusion. Anger follows sadness, and I ask myself what’s created and what occurs naturally. I’ve tracked every dip, evidence, I think, of hitting bottom. Yet collective grief grows stranger: increasingly ambient, increasingly solitary.
This is the terror of objet petit a: not her, not me, but the trembling hinge between us. A lunar fulcrum of recognition and unknowability. That mutual gap instructs. It presses against my calm like a nerve-triggered memory. I am conscious of prepping for 35. Of learning to name desires beyond a grocery list. Of the ache of being witnessed even as I wish to disappear.
Falters, resumes. Not seeing the conditions outside haunts the sealed interior. You dust around it, live beside it, call it safe, but still can’t see what lies beyond.
Her shirt seems to grow with each setback, the white sleeve deeper, dragging further, expanding outward. Taking the place of certainty, of giving crisp edges, was the afterimage of grace denied. Things that grow know better than to believe the self is set. Lacan leads objet a as feminine emancipation, beyond representation, beyond possession. Yet what charts its course might still be projection.
Return to source: the ingenue, plucked from obscurity, whose skin scent tethers time to tangent. Stretched between the Lares and the Penates with mood, weight, and time to consider. Rushing to achieve nothing, insisting on being crowned in white.