self-portraits IN MOTION. 2023.
Paralysed by thoughts. Eating at a toe on the ground. A foot tucked from out of covers. A bed on which nothing ever made love. On which no love was ever made. On which no one ever made love. Deemed unfit by aching tides of cool liquid that stare her down like ice—frozen and still—a lossless creature endures. Beyond the reaches of the door, of the frames and the windows, she can hear no sound but her own. Those that wander and lead astray the pending motions of emotion that delay upon every passing hour. Clear as non-day, she is stuffed with the bountiful words of grapes, filling up her gaping mouth and clinging to the dangling participle in the back of her throat like a monkey clutching onto ropes withered and strayed by the sun. Stuffed like a roast pig on a platter, like a headless duck in a display window, stuffed like pickled foxes and umbilical cords in stuffy rooms of dust. When she wakes, after a night of no sleep, the seeded fruits float above cold marble countertops. When she wakes, after another night of no sleep, the sunflowers in the vase have died and all the plates in her cupboards have gone mad and cracked and brittled at their own accord. After another night without waking or sleeping, she is met with a decapitated hand presented to her on the only unbroken plate left. She deems it not to be her own despite her rightmost hand very much missing and gone astray without a moment’s notice. A cigarette clings to her morning lips, freshly dried and dehydrated like basil left in a cold oven. She is sticky with the dew of mornings past, of lust bygone, of meetings with other selves that belong only elsewhere. Wasting away tomorrow’s keepsakes of yesterday’s burden, the room left to despair is collected in a fragile sense of the way that things were. Escape is a fleeting word. Escape escapes her. Putting her hand to the smoke, the billows swallow her whole. She swallows herself whole, like a net to a fish, like a mouth to a bundle of grapes. She favours subdued states of being, hushed into the darkness of a closet or a foggy mirror reflection. Crushed by the weight of joy and bliss, they become unbearable. And sadness weeps for an intolerable amount of despair. Across the table, across the room, through the doorways and on the other ends of corridors, she waits, she situates herself. She stares and awaits. She potters around the cold kitchen floor, the empty bed, the stiff couch. Hanging by the fringes of subdued plights, she remains a solidified mass of thoughts and words unsaid and meshes of lingering childhood breaths. Wide-eyed, sick as a ghost, she continues to tell her to wait, that she is writing their story.
