1. Incommunicado

Another year had gone by and this was only solidifying Ginger’s suspicion: he was losing touch. It was not that he was losing touch with his friends and family members, most of whom he would routinely contact in one way or another: a phone call or a text message; a postcard or a rock through a window; an electronic letter or a thoughtful Tweet.

Sometimes even in person, as was the case now: leaning against a balcony filled with peers in conical party hats. Reckless conversations filled with laughter floated around Ginger as he held an untouched flute of flat champagne and looked out at and into the seeming void of night, a moment later filled with a shower of distant embers – fireworks cracking their knuckles in the sky and then dying there, leaving only faint ghosts of smoke.

The first one, a blue one, was what set the underlying suspicion into epiphanic motion.

Ginger’s main problem, apart from his name, was that he had been losing touch with himself. This, of course, refers to the figurative or colloquial sense of “touch” as Ginger could still feel himself. For example, in the shower, when he would be provoking ejaculation, his body was operating in full with healthy tactile responses. But there was something missing, even in these moments of selfish intimacy. What had gone? What had left? It was emotion that should have been accompanying the exodus of semen from the prostate gland to the shower drain and tiles and curtain and knobs, et cetera.

The cognitive emotion of identity.

This is my penis, launching my sperm on to my shower mat.

He was, as far as he could tell, a stranger to himself without any practical means of communication, and what was worse, without any real desire for it. The only desire Ginger could muster was the want to want, because he could call upon thin memories of how good it felt, or rather he could understand or acknowledge such an existence of a good feeling as it pertained to desire. He did not feel these recollections and instead viewed them like one might the pages in a ledger that was once relevant.

It had been a full calender year since the sensation of identity began to flee. He knew this well because the first instance was the prior New Year’s Eve when his fiancè asked him, “Ginger, baby, hon, what’s your resolution?”

The thought hadn’t crossed his mind and this would have been more upsetting to him if it weren’t so upsetting to him, you see. Despite constant failure, he always had a resolution ready in place for coming year, because he loved blind optimism and how it would always grow with champagne. Ginger thought on this, his hands upon his lover’s enormous waist, and let the thought go with a shrug that doubled as his answer to the question.

Several months later, it doesn’t really matter how many, Ginger called the wedding off. And when she wept in his arms, he shrugged here too. Shrugging became his non-verbal mantra. One day he woke up and his shoulders were sore. He tried to shrug this off, but it led to a mildly painful reminder. It was this day that he developed a second technique with which he translated the meaning and motion of the shrug to his eyebrows and lids. The Facial Shrug, he might have called it, had he any desire to name anything anymore.

The days had passed him by, yet they were also catching up with him. It’s kind of difficult to figure out. Did they lap him? I do not know, but no matter the case, the result forged a sadness in Ginger’s next shrug, which was performed in perfect accordance with the routine of his motions, yet the feeling itself did not get “shrugged” off, nor away. This brewed up a flurry of worry, which Ginger immediately tried to combat with his back up, the Facial Shrug, to no avail.

This was a frustrating failure, because that’s the way he saw it, blind to the successes that were blossoming around him: sadness, worry, and now frustration.

Soon the fireworks fell dark and silent, and once again, a snarl of boozy conversations was the only backdrop to Ginger’s thoughts. He emptied his glass with one swallow and resolved that within the year, he would have a New Year’s Resolution prepared for next year.

 

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