Lovers’ Disappearance
by Thomas Hobohm
I started off slow. I lost names, faces. Soon I ceased to understand the objects around me, their categories: colors, shapes, functions. It wasn’t long before I forgot myself, who I had been, was, wanted to be. I became nothing, I became nothing I couldn’t be. I learned techniques of emptiness, how to pour water out of an already-empty carafe, how to construct a vacuum that doesn’t contain even itself, a vacuum of vacuums. In this non-place, communication ceased, being ceased, events ceased. It was there that you fell for me: my vacant stare pulled you down, your arms pulled me up. With your bare hands you built a boy and named him me. It wasn’t dialectical. You created something from nothing, from nowhere. And now that something has run away, abandoned you. So, you’ll start off slow. You’ll lose names, faces. Soon you’ll cease to understand the objects around you. Don’t worry: I’ll find you someday, which is to say I’ll find the things that could become you, and I’ll assemble the thing you could become.
Thomas Hobohm lives in San Francisco but grew up in Texas. They are the Web Editor at The Adroit Journal, and their work has appeared in Poetry Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Astrolabe. Find them at https://www.thomashobohm.com/.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Lovers’ Disappearance”? This piece emerged out of my reading of Alain Badiou’s work, specifically “In Praise of Love” and “Philosophy and the Event.” Badiou speaks of love as “The Scene of Two”—for him, when two people fall in love, they construct a new subjectivity together, a wholly new orientation toward life. I began to imagine what it would be like to truly forget the world, and to create a new one with my beloved. And then what it would feel like for that world to fall apart. The final piece ended up a lot shorter than my first draft, because my natural impulse as a writer was to add more details, more signifiers, more descriptions. While revising, I cut most of that out to convey the sense of loss that had motivated me to write the piece in the first place. If I’m being honest, I believe romance is really like that: you lose yourself, you are found, you find somebody, they are lost. It is happening everywhere, all of the time.
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