Soft Landing, Attempted
Ejaculation was not, for me, a matter of pleasure so much as verification—an imprecise proof that I had not yet broken. The difficulty was that the proof referred to no agreed-upon standard. I had never defined what condition would count as “unbroken,” never established an endpoint against which the claim could be measured. And yet I continued to verify. With repetition, the act altered its function. What began as confirmation became so automated that confirmation was no longer required. Little intention remained in it. I was, simply, repeating.
I retain the sensation that I am trying to land. Whether I am actually decelerating is another matter. It is possible that I have mistaken a steady orbit for a reduction in speed. “Soft landing” has the quality of a phrase imported from elsewhere, a term whose assurance exceeds my experience of it by a small but persistent margin.
In the morning I inventory the body: pain, dullness, minor irregularities. These present themselves as residues of the previous night’s activity, reliably there. I drink coffee and let the bitterness settle in the mouth while attempting to reconstruct the route—how it began, the point at which return became unlikely, where it ended. The particulars dissolve almost at once, leaving behind a single pattern. Repetition tends to level memory.
When I was frequenting encounter cafés, the range of choice appeared limitless. In practice, each choice returned me to the same place. Similar voices, similar gestures, similar silences. Individual episodes gradually lost their distinctness within the cycle. It may be that I was not choosing people so much as tracing, again and again, the path that led to a familiar result.
Medication made the body more obedient. Time, too, could be managed to a degree. The impulse, however, did not submit; if anything, it acquired sharper edges. The feeling of control became one more component of the system it purported to regulate. I called this efficiency, while recognizing, at the same time, something in it that resembled a premonition of failure.
There exists only the assumption that I am slowing down. No reliable measure confirms it. More often I suspect that I am gliding at a constant altitude. Even so, I am reluctant to relinquish the word “landing.” Without it, I would be unable to posit an end to the motion at all.
On reflection, there was never a destination to begin with. There was only motion, to which I later assigned the idea of an endpoint in order to make it legible. Even so, I persist in believing that some final destination must exist, and I continue to search for its location. I attempt to decelerate toward a terminus that is not there. The structure of this effort contains a certain absurdity.
At intervals—brief, discontinuous—there are moments that approximate sobriety. Nothing is being done, and nothing seems lacking. They do not last. The system reasserts itself and draws me back into its orbit. Still, the fact of those moments, however fleeting, serves as the only available index.
A soft landing may be less a state than a technique, or even merely the name for a series of attempts. Not an achievement but a process sustained over time. In that sense, its remaining unaccomplished is not necessarily failure.
Within an unending repetition, I try to introduce a slight deviation of course. That minimal drift is, for now, what I mean by deceleration, and also, perhaps, the nearest thing to the prospect of landing.
