With exaltation and despair, he looked longingly at the wreckage. Startled eyes reify minute, banal, routine events. The past demands pained admiration.
The image of his unborn brother tumbling down a set of stairs remained unseen, a repressed unreality, never to be invoked. He never was, nor would've been. When he asked mother about him, she grew quiet and retreated inward. Her answer would be uniform. "I don't know what you're talking about."
His hero, Van Gogh, experienced a similar exulted pain. Van Gogh saw a reality undeniably foreign to others. In a mad Absinthe induced fit, he sliced off his ear, possibly to test 'reality'. There was no true being, no singular reality, only the sight of his bloody dismembered ear lying in a crimson pool. Reality is not merely a particular or a universal. It is the violent incommensurable interstice of the two. He stared at the portrait of the single-eared genius on the wall and laughed uncontrollably. It was the absurd and he understood it now.
