Image Credit: Still from The Turin Horse, directed by Béla Tarr.
The process of dying is part of living.
— Dr. Drew.
The thing is, that sometimes the feeling of a moment slipping away is like pointing toward the movement of a finger or an indexing of aging, slowly, though often, the light seems to be in the way.
You used to be just as you are right now once, in a difference place, at a different time, the dragging persistence of self.
Home is where the dogs are.
The heartbreaking sight of your dogs’ forlorn faces as you pack up and walk out the door.
Then, while driving home, looking into a brightly lit bus to see all the sad faces, all the old faces, the smiling face of a girl, laughing, the blank face of a man, seated, and this seems somehow a beautiful sight.
Then, the rising moon, shy and yellow.
What the sky looks like proportional to how often you cry.
The moon is hiding from me.
And then, something as silly as Linkin Park’s “In the End” playing on the radio to springboard you into an urgent and devastating nostalgia.
Is this living?
Is this more or less functional than being a zombie? That is, is it okay to spend more time feeling and crying rather than working and doing?
In my own eyes, what is the eventual outcome, the eventual fate of all of these movements?
Toy soldiers that speak. They seek out the Gorgonite scum.
The sad and forlorn Gorgonites. They seek a home.
Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Wiiiind.
Yes, the wind.
One’s relationship with their house is a look at their intimacy with that space.
That is, I am on my way home, yet it is uncertain where exactly I am on my way too.
That is, my home might be in transition, several different spaces in a short period of time. So the space that holds my bed? My books? Where I get changed in the morning? Where I brush my teeth?
How long have you lived in your home? What makes a home a home?
Home: where the silence asserts itself like a person, loud and daunting, the silence that is frightening and a comfort. Here, asleep. Here, the attempt to sleep. Where insomnia is at its most intimidating.
Home: where familiar arms hold you. That feeling of being there with a person, the slanted streams of light that enter in the morning, the buzzing of power lines, the familiar cold that embraces you. Here, the privilege of an extra blanket and the privilege of lying in your arms. Crossing into beyond. Night.
The universe comes to inhabit the house.
— Gaston Bachelard
Sometimes, I’m lying here and I can feel it all stretch out around me, a flat and thin outline that permeates through and the space becomes very empty, very full. Here, I remember my mother and many childhood spaces, this deepness of memory and grief: there are currently no photos of my mother in my room. Yet in my room I most often remember her, most often lie in my bed holding the stuffed animal dog that I got for her once when she was in the hospital. One of its ears is chewed up and extra floppy from when she let my dog play with it.
He’s going to chew it up, I said.
It’s okay, she said.
In a home, everything is transparent and undiscoverable. That is, you enter a person’s home and you have the distinct feeling that it is growing. You breathe in a strange vapor while in the heat, you feel the desire fill the space like your lungs during a run. At others it is cold, and it feels like there is a lack of love. You have the urge to rearrange everything, and then, to turn on the heat or light a fire.
At home, you can’t help but try and counter that constant shadow of heartbreak or relief. You realize how your home is filled with things that are quite useless, but these things help you function somehow and the element of unreality is what keeps you going anyway. The home is mythical. It might not exist at all. In your dreams you’re always in the wrong house anyway, or it’s thwarted or morphed somehow.
How the deformed version of a home becomes the dream becomes your hands becomes the breath breathed out by you when uttering words becomes hands searching for another body during the night becomes standing on the sidewalk in the mist of rain becomes I am not dead, yet.
The convergence of an entire reality and the absence of other versions of homes becomes a spectral longing. I long to put the pieces back together but they don’t exist anymore. I long to see my mother but she doesn’t exist either.
Most days, the technological implements I touch are the most real evidence that I exist.
I’m used to lingering and waiting for you.
But if a house.
We hover.
Is better built.
The oscillations reverberate.
At home.
Why are you never alone with me?
That’s just it.
I just want to be alone with you.
