5 Then, who is the X?

The writer’s X is the noun in the blank. X marks the spot of the desired object, the muse, the subject, the obsessive chords in the Cure song, the space to which you return in order to feel the particular one-more-time that lacks a time. He is the one you drag into the meadow of the poem; his are the eyes for which you create stars.

But the X is also the one whom you ruin by revealing.

Roland Barthes knew this. Barthes wrote an entire book, The Lover’s Discourse, about how to address our X. About what we do with our X. About what our X does to us. About the velocity of all the X’s that encounter each other in our words. About the infidelity of the mind that cannot resist the X, the X, the XX’ing.

Barthes has been my X. As has Walter Benjamin.

Composer Alexander Scriabin is currently my X, and I am not finished with him. I am, properly, unfinished by him.

The X waits for the writer in what André Aciman calls the “irrealis moods,” or:

…a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative . . . the might-be and the might-have-been.

Your X only exists as long as you agree to imagine and see them.

The problem for the X is that their existence is predicated on your desire to continue imagining them, and to invest in that imagining as a relationship.

Tell yourself any lie except for the most cowardly one, namely, that you are capable of accurately “representing” your X. Let there be no mistake in this, and no obfuscation: the only X you are responsible for is the one you created.