Journal: Entry for Gaps

Alexis was a philosophy student at the University of Michigan who, in the summer of 1998, underwent a profound period of uncertainty and mental angst, first becoming an ardent believer in Sartre’s existentialism, then reading Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” deep into the night, over and over again, comforted by its extreme structure and passive silence over moments that could not be logically disseminated, before finally developing a deep and shared infatuation with her married upper-level philosophy professor and adopting, too, his deep (and perhaps unhealthy) obsession with Hegelian phenomenology. Her professor said to her once, “Every where I look, I see people struggling to obtain something that, once obtained, could not possibly give them the satisfaction that they imagined it could,” a statement which struck Alexis as a deep commentary on his soul and the eternal, shared human struggle. They called or wrote constantly, meeting up for coffee discussions when they could, but Alexis knew he was struggling with the ethical and moral boundary of both his position as a professor, and his marriage to his overweight and angry wife.

And so, for three days near the tail-end of the summer, he would not answer her phone calls, once again throwing her into a deep depression. As she walked through the city at night with one of her friends, they noticed a man helping an attractive woman into a sports car, the curve of her back interrupted by the mysteriousness of three Asian characters, which, surely, held an ancient answer to one of life’s many unanswerable questions.

Two weeks later, Henry Clayton, her professor, was bending Alexis over the empty and flat expanse of his desk at 9 o’clock at night, pushing up her shirt and pulling down her pants, his mind a humid and nasal heaviness of lust. Moments before she had asked if he would like to see her new tattoo, and when he whispered a terrified “Yes, very much so...”, she had lifted up her tank top and turned around, her heart beating like a hollow drum, and her back showing only a single, large question mark.