kagablog

The Abandonment Kid sets things up to fail in order to satisfy his secret need to be abandoned (coping with abandonment is what he does best). As soon as love takes hold of his heart he begins to create the impossible conditions that will drive the Runaway Girl towards the door; and when he succeeds in forcing her to abandon him, when the terrifying possibility of being loved has receded, he breathes a sigh of relief, and returns to his familiar, and therefore comfortable, condition of abandonment.

Analytically the Runaway Girl can easily understand his condition but since she is not his mother she does not want to act as a surrogate for his mother in an infantile fantasy play of power and she therefore abandons him to his abandonment; giving him, ironically, exactly what he needs, the fuel to eke out a few measly poems and another chapter of self-analysis.

Instead of love, the Abandonment Kid is addicted to creating products: the prolificity, the sheer volume of which, can be measured at a glance. In this way the raging falls of his desperate need to be loved can be sublimated and returned to the world as “self-expression” in its most purely fetishized form, as the commodity. Thus, in an ironic double-negation of the notion of love equalling success, the Abandoment Kid not merely wallows in his misery
but, through promoting himself to the title King of Abandonment, actually attains a kind of gleeful prestige in his position. This is his true perversion, and not the many, silly, bizarre sexual deviances that he forces the Runaway Girl one to indulge in.

It is only when abandoned that the Abandonment Kid feels truly at home.

The Runaway Girl has never been allowed to grow up because the mother that she is running away from always sorts things out for her. Strangely enough, this very exercise of parental love in the mother’s case serves to disengage the runaway girl from the potential to be involved in a situation to the extent of taking responsibility and facing consequences. The mother’s influence actually disempowers the runaway girl and leaves her floating;
when she seeks solace in the world of narcotics it is not in order to expand her consciousness and deliver her from the quotidian into the floating world, but in fact to actually ground herself by providing herself with an adequate, sensible reason for the very condition of perpetual float that she finds herself in. Prevented from acquiring a library of accomplishments of her own, the Runaway Girl is allowed to feebly critique the mother, although not to her face, in a child-like fantasy state that relegates all authority to “the world” and her own condition to that of “the princess”.

When she meets the Abandonment Kid she believes that she has found a partner with which to share her anti-authoritarian fantasy world, her “soul mate”. Instead of building up a world, as “adults” do, by a series of successful interventions in reality that could be attributed to her own making, the Runaway Girl runs away from her lack of a world by appropriating the Abandonment Kid’s world as her “own”. This soon becomes a nightmare when the Abandonment Kid is revealed to be merely another authoritarian figure, actually in the world, albeit a world of his own solipsistic creation. His ruthlessly megalomaniacal demands and ill-treatment of her would do
the fascist dictators proud.

Increasingly bullied and abused, the Runaway Girl is at first blinded to the real reasons for his condition, and comes back five times for more punishment. Eventually even her fantasy world has to capitulate to his frenzied attacks and, crushed by yet another failure that she perceives to be hers, she is forced to abandon him (thereby giving him exactly what he secretly desires, and thus perversely satisfying his innermost need).

At the point of being fully abandoned by the Runaway Girl, the Abandonment Kid is roused out of his entirely self-absorbed stupor and sees her for who she is. This is the point at which he is finally able to love her. But of course it is too late. Her ersatz world shattered, the Runaway Girl has had no recourse but to find shelter in “the world”, that very world her child-like state of innocence had once pretended not to be a part of - she has, almost miraculously, like the sleeping beauty kissed by the prince, grown up. But now she sees that the Abandonment Kid was never a prince and merely, always, the frog. Once again, in a movement of perversely displaced irony, the two have given each other what neither of them dared disclose that they wanted.

Real life, real love, these are abstract concepts. In the Valliant Bar at 2am the Abandonment Kid wants to speak of these matters. To attempt some kind of an explanation. But the Runaway girl, sensing that she might be prepared to listen, demands to be taken home, and even the potential to gain something of meaning for both of them, a shared moment of resolution, is thwarted.

The Runaway Girl runs away to her next lover.
The Abandonment Kid at least has his cats.