"I run on whiskey and risk, and ennui and impatience"

Method Suicide | Jacob Scheier
Method Suicide

When Konstantin kills himself,
the actor is off-stage not even pretending to kill himself.
This is why Chekhov is so brilliant and died
only three years after falling in love for the first time. Of course,
Chekhov was saying something about plot
having little to do with events. If The Seagull were fiction,
Constantine’s brain splatter
would fall neatly between a set of brackets.

The phone rang like a gunshot
in the other room. I nearly believed you that time,
though you were playing too many characters
for a realistic comedy. You cannot be Konstantin
and at the same time tell Trigorin/the audience,
“You have just killed yourself!”
The whole thing felt a little Brechtian:
your near death stimulating
only on an intellectual level -
suicide as social gest.

This is why you will never be a great actress.
You can’t just want to die.
You have to live it.
This is what separates the great performances from the mediocre
(I think my mother trained in Stanislavsky).

Chekhov frequented brothels.
He was incapable of trusting or loving a woman,
which might not be different things.

I didn’t leave you after the first attempt,
only because I was reading Lady with Lapdog at the time
and I thought Chekhov was saying that suffering was a requisite
for authentic love.
I didn’t know he was just telling a story,
that suffering is just a description of the landscape,
that love is the only requisite for love.

In my dreams there's a horse, he stands eighteen hands high

I can see his face, when he talks to me over the phone, across all those miles and all those mistakes. I can see his expressions, the way he pulls his cigarettes towards his mouth, rails against everything he knows, rants for twenty minutes before thinking to ask how I'm doing. I can see how he thinks, but I don't know if he realizes what he's arguing for, when he says I should come home. Move back, that the people there are better for me than the people anywhere else, that there's something more to home that nowhere else can contain.

And I want to lash out, ask him if he realizes how trapped home makes me feel, tell him to read my writing from before I left, the pages and pages I scrawled out about how much I wanted to leave, wanted new, wanted passion and discovery in a manner that there can't supply me with anymore. And part of me wants to give in, move home, curl up next to him and forget about the millions of other possibilities, the million other paths.

But if it didn't make me happy three years ago, two years ago, what about it would make me happy now, what has changed that would make it enough. He offers words, ideas of home, but it is not the home I left two years ago, there is little left of that version, and there is nothing to signify that what remains is better, just different, just less connected.

And I won't say no, I won't swear no, but nothing drives me to return there for anything beyond short visits and vacations. It is not that there is nothing there for me anymore, it is just that there is so much more somewhere else.