B*A*N*K

new orleans long before katrina.

and me and my parents hangin' out in a less well established corner of the city; it's like a mismatched quilt--elegant restaurants and people in evening gowns and tuxes here. . .kidz in ripped up clothes slammin this-n-that across the street.

and we seem to be in both places at once.

maybe we're nowhere...fuck knows.

but we're movin'...meandering...gliding from joint to joint. or perhaps i should say, from joint to establishment, yeah. that's more like it.

"what a GREAT day!!" my mom says, "shall we visit our good friends at the bank?"

she's, like, airy or something. airy and light and full of fresh-cut flowers and little white bunny rabbits. and my dad says, "why sure, dear...let's do that." and even tho i am an adult, he takes my hand like i can't figure out where to go or how to properly tag along like a good kid, and we're off, gliding on our invisible monorails towards a brick building on the opposite side of the street. there's a big sign nailed to the front of the structure. it says,

B*A*N*K

and my mother -always the one for appearances says, "we need to don our sunday best. i want a bonnet. i want ribbons. i want some pretty patent leather shoes."

and my father says, "don't be silly dear...you know the bank is closed on sunday."

and

thru a big wooden door that had been propped open -like it was expecting us, waiting for us to get there, we glide.

the bank is a huge, stadium-sized deal and it is full of furniture. chairs are sitting on chairs are sitting on chairs.  they are piled so high that they are un-sit-able (except by other chairs, apparently)

and the velvet rope around the edge, propped up by chrome supports leads us along the outer rim of the room.  We pass by tellers and wandering customers who seem oblivious to the impractical excess surrounding them...

and all i can think of is...

where's the bathroom?

i gotta pee.

we get to the counter. it's free junior mints for kids. i open the box and all the little erythrocite-dealies in there are normal...except for one.

it's...blonde.

i fish it out. where's the chocolatey-brownness of the chocolate?

it was eeeewwwwwwww. like, who would eat that?  its presence contaminated the pristine yumminess of entire box - and suddenly i see all the normal brown guys as suspect -as blonde guys in hiding...and after 40 years of wondering what that closure tab on the junior mints box is actually FOR (because who eats half a box and then saves the rest for later? LOL) i realize it is for THIS eventuality -for that moment when you discover a mutated candy in the box.

i pick up another box and peer inside. there are more blonde ones in this new box; i close it and give up.

 we are standing at the window in the bank.

i still have to pee.

suddenly i realize that i am peeing on the floor of the bank. only it is dark and no one can see me or the puddle forming between my feet.  as we walk off i shuffle through the pee, thinking that if i spread it out some it will dry faster and no one will notice what i did.

and now we are walking along the exterior of the other side of the room, guided still by velvet ropes...heading for the door, i hope.

night time,

bank is closed

parents are gone

and i'm alone in the

drip

drip

drippy wetness of the basement

and there's ductwork and the rice-crispy goodness of crackling electrical boxes, and weird shit all around me.

twisted wire.

and the scuttling of shadowy forms.

and now the darkness of a man approaching.

and

i got nowhere to go...am my mother's white bunny.

i am not me, and there is no DOWN to my safe place (breathing underwaterland)

only cinderblocks and concrete

and me in an unlocked closet, with my foot wedged between floor and door.

and footsteps approaching, i reach to turn off the light. if he cannot see me in here...if there is nothing but blackness he will just leave. i flip the switch and it doesn't work. the light is blasting onto my face and i see him looking through the crack between the door and the frame. he is not just perusing my features, there is eye-contact.

oh god.

it is time for me

to be

shredded.

and left half dead.

and then

he

leaves...

and before i find out if get to live or die, simon starts yowling at the door.

and i wake up.

bleary and weird. and simon leaps onto the bed. he just wants to go out and play, he doesn't realize he just saved my life.

:)

or?

maybe he does.

Wolff Gallery

Today?  Studio visit.  Zemie Barr and Shannon O'Connor braved the ice outside my house to journey here and look at my work to see if it fits into the aesthetic sensibility at Wolff Gallery.   They think "yes."  And since it's the only gallery I wanted to contact in Portland, I am really glad they also think it's a fit. 

Rather interesting, I asked them how they arrived at the name for the gallery.  There were so many reasons!  For one, they mentioned that they are interested in representing traditionally under-represented artists -artists who remain under the wire, anonymous, if you will.  And they told me about a quotation by Virginia Woolf that I'd never heard before, but that really struck me:

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

They also mentioned that the double-f on the end of the gallery's name represented them in a way, 2 Females, women. 

I loved watching them look at my boxes.  They made little exclamations.  They un-scrolled the scrolls, touched and noticed everything.  It was good.  We talked about the Ghost Ships project and I think that looks like a "GO!"  Very VERY glad about that since I am sitting here with all these frames, images and trinkets and no home for them.  I also told them about my murmurations idea, and they seemed interested in that, so maybe some time down the line...

They drove off after about an hour and a half, with 4 of my tiny pieces to put in their shop.  I feel really fortunate to have connected with them and am very much looking forward to seeing how things unfold! 

Actual snow in portland...

So today at 4 PM, the school announced while I was in the middle of a lecture that they were closing an hour early because of "impending inclement weather."  and that we should "pack up our belongings" and gtfo.  I as I peered through the window into the flake-free parking lot, I thought,

"OK, so now PCC is closing because it might snow in the future...."

Really, Portland is the laughing stock of the nation when it comes to snow and how we react to it.  Here is an article written in the Oregonian in December about how the entire city closed down for an INCH of snow.  We seriously go nuts here when a single flake drops from the heavens.

But tonight?  Yeah!  we actually got some real snow!  here is a photo taken from my front porch about 15 minutes ago:

January 10, 2017

January 10, 2017

 

 

This morning I received an email from a gallery that one of my boxes, "Dust," was damaged during the show.  As the story goes, an unsupervised child was running around in the gallery and knocked my box off of its perch.  I don't have the box back yet, but I feel sick to my stomach. 

This would be the second box that was damaged in a gallery.  And the kicker is that they are not that delicate. 

I have a studio visit next Saturday with the Wolff Gallery and she is interested in the boxes.  Right now I'm not sure I ever want to show them again.

At what point does a utilitarian object become "art?"

Black and White and Gray all Over

Do you think you’re a “good” person?  I bet you do.  Most folks do.  But when you and I get into an argument and I walk away thinking that you’re an asshole, and you walk away thinking I am...well, who’s the asshole?  I know, I know...THEY are.  But what if they aren’t? 

I began thinking about this last year when I did something in particular and thought to myself, “Wow, ‘good’ people don’t do that kind of shit.”  But I’m a good person, aren’t I?  Well, maybe I’m not...or maybe instead, it’s not useful thinking of people in terms of “good” or “bad.”  Because the fact is, good people do bad things, and bad people do good things.  Smart people do stupid things, and people you think are dumb can be really insightful.  It’s a muddy world out there, and it’s a muddy world in here *taps chest* -if you know what I mean. 

So what's "good," anyway?   Mostly folks agree on the basics, and it’s really not that confusing, is it?  Most of us value the same sorts of things:  loyalty, honesty, kindness, intelligence, and being good in the sack generally rank pretty high on most people’s lists.   OOPS, sorry...that last bit just kinda slipped out there...  :P

But OK, Honesty.  This is a quality that I have wrestled with my whole life.  I believe people should be honest.  But they’re not, and frankly, I’m not.  So for example, in my capacity as a teacher I sometimes tell little fibs.  It goes like this:  I make a JUDGMENT about how a person is doing (emotionally) in their process, and I give them feedback based on a combination of factors....so if x + y + z < 0 I lie.  if x + y + z = 0 I give them a soft truth.  It x + y + z > 0 I give them a hard truth.  Here, x is how long they've been working at it.  Y is how I believe they are feeling.  And z is the quality of the print.  See what I'm saying?

Sometimes, after a person has sweated in the darkroom making multiple prints of the same image trying to perfect it, and they come out feeling proud of themselves for a print that is still slightly blown out in the highlights, and I KNOW that hearing a critical comment from me will squash them, I lie.  I tell them it’s awesome and their grade also reflects the awesomeness.  And MOSTLY it IS awesome....it’s just that one spot, you know?  Or that one quality that could have been a bit more carefully rendered.  Because here’s the thing, if they shuffle off with their print –yes, the one that they were so proud of- feeling defeated and with their tail between their legs, they are less likely to continue doing photography at all.  And as long as they come back, we can work on those little things.  I have had students stay with me for years, who have gone back and looked at the work they did in Photo 1, and then said to me, “Wow...these prints are not so good, huh?”  Because they can see it now, and that is how it’s supposed to be: they are supposed to get good enough to know for themselves when the print still needs attention. 

I guess I would say that I tell them what I believe they need to hear.  Sometimes what is needed is a well-considered fib.  Sorry, just the truth there...because sometimes the actual truth is not useful.  It just isn’t.   Since I’m outing myself on this topic, I should say that I also get people who reeeeeally want the truth and who would prefer a hard truth to a lie, and a hard truth to a soft one.  And I have no problem at all saying what I see. 

Here's another tidbit:   I tell them I always tell the truth.  But that in itself is also a lie. 

One last tidbit:  What I say to them in critique (a public forum) is not the same as what I say to them in person. 

It’s a slippery slope. 

Moving on from the teaching realm (and I saved this for last because nobody is going to read this far) here’s another thing in the truth department...and this is where I went wrong last year.    FACEBOOK.  Omg, with the FB humble-bragging.  I fucking hate it.  My sister said I should really try to get my work out there on FB, and last year I made a valiant attempt.  I tried all kinds of wording, tried the humble-bragging, tried excitement, etc.  but it all just seems like so much self aggrandizement. 

I had (notice the past tense) a friend –and I considered her a friend irl...not just a FB friend.—who was something of a champion at posting her accomplishments on her FB feed.  OK.  That’s her business and her thing –works for her, wouldn’t work for me, but I still couldn’t help having sentiments about it. 

Well, guess what I did.  I composed a letter to my sister, stating my opinions about one of her posts.  I did so in derogatory terms.  And I accidentally sent it to the person I was criticizing.  OMFG...can you say:  Terrible Moment.   Yep, it was a terrible moment.  And it’s a moment I will remember for the rest of my life for so many reasons.  Here are some:

It was a moment of honesty that I would NEVER have shared with anybody but my sister, much less the subject of the criticism.  I really DID believe that this person’s post was horseshit.   And though this ex-friend and I had previously discussed how her FB presence didn’t really match her real life self, I had never stated -nor would I ever have been so specific and harsh in my critique of her posts.  I hurt her feelings.  Like, a lot.  It is the one thing that has continued to be hard for me to swallow.  That I could say something hurt somebody like this. 

This experience also solidified my beliefs about telling the truth.  Some "truths" are just not useful.  But I have been taught, and also on some level believe that the truth is important...that it is somehow "real" and that there is value simply in knowing that reality.  So I want to be honest.  And I was wondering:  if the truth is hard to tell, then maybe there is some way of changing certain kinds of truth.  Subjective truths, truths that are about how something makes you feel... these kinds of subjective "truths" might be mutable.  Meaning:  what if I could change how I feel in the first place?   Alternately, what if I could get into a place of non-judgment about stuff that doesn't matter anyway.

Anyhow, my ex-friend has certainly moved on from this.  However, because I am the perpetrator, I have not been as successful letting go of it.  Many times, this whole affair has made me wonder:  “am I really a ‘good’ person?”   “do ‘good’ people act like I act?”  and you know what?  I think they do.  Because unless we are 2 years old or we are not too swift, we all form opinions about how the world should be, and sometimes the world doesn’t manifest in expected ways, and/or other folks don't see or believe the same things we do.

Seems like the older I get, the grayer the world becomes.  It was so much easier when the whole shebang was black and white.

 

ARGH!  I keep going back and forth on these 2 variations.  Long?  or short?  Short?  or long? 

for the love of Stories

I always found ways of surviving trauma.  When I was little, trauma looked kinda like this:

  • Math class
  • Moving
  • Navigating my way in a foreign country
  • Eating my broccoli
  • What to wear to school
  • My dad’s wrath

And so on...  These days it’s a little more complicated, but not much. 

Right now I’m remembering my youth and what it was like to suffer through math class.   I was attending an international school in München that was teaching something called, “New Math.” 

Topics introduced in the New Math include modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, bases other than 10, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and abstract algebra.  All of these topics (with the exception of algebraic inequalities) have been greatly de-emphasized or eliminated in US elementary schools and high schools curricula since the 1960s.

Just to say, this subject made no sense to me at all.  Even my mother, who routinely helped me with my homework, finally threw her hands up in the air and declared that she couldn’t do it either.  I was, forthwith, shuffled off to my bedroom where I was supposed to wrestle with this shit on my own.  K, it sucked.  But here’s the thing...

I had a radio in my bedroom.  And this radio became my best friend every night during my “math studies.”  Most particularly, I found a station that featured mysteries and dramas.  I am not sure of the particularities anymore, but I do remember, specifically, a show called SUSPENSE!

I got totally lost in these stories...I loved them.  And then they disappeared.  And it was years before I really cared very much about radio again.  In 1998 a friend introduced me to Art Bell, and all the old joy of radio flooded back to me...then Art retired, and the world was silent again. 

Last year, by accident, I discovered podcasts!  I had no idea that it was actually radio.  And a whole new world of imagination opened up to me!  Man, I love these things!!  Here are my current favorites...

I'm always looking for new ones.  I like dramas best...stories that unfold and unwind over time.  There are other good shows, like "Lore."   But the extended story is where it's at for me...maybe I need to expand my listening parameters beyond shows with a paranormal bent to them.

At some point last week I realized that I run stories in my head, like, all the time.  I was shopping at an antique store and stumbled into a vendor's booth...they had tons of Victorian lace in little plastic baggies, crocheted doilies, wooden furniture with elaborate scrollwork, and various odd bits and bobs.  I sat in this space for about 45 minutes.  I opened each plastic baggy - noticed that the vendor had folded them with care- to examine the intricate details of each piece of lace.  I could see how each was made, how some of them were put together in little modules, I imagined what kind of dress each piece of lace or trim had been attached to...I wondered what happened to the rest of the dress...I ruminated about the women who actually wore these dresses, what their lives were like... and then I carefully re-folded each piece with care.  I finally arrived at the register and the clerk said, "Ach!  This vendor can't figure out if he is #44 or #47!!"  and I said, "HE?"  And then I thought, good lord, I am SOOOO stereotyping.  But I was also a bit surprised, because I had also unknowingly imagined the vendor.  

And then I thought about every human interaction I have...There is so much that goes into every single meeting.  All our histories (mine and theirs) follow us into each present moment making it difficult to just see the uniqueness of each PERSON in front of us.  How to take each individual I meet without "filling in the gaps?"   Stop, I guess.  Remember to not remember.  Listen.  and know that each person who enters my orbit brings with them an ungraspable complexity that my imagined stories can never do justice to.  

me, at 60. (I know you will fill in the gaps!)

me, at 60. (I know you will fill in the gaps!)

Happy and Fulfilling New Year to All!!

2016

● Discovery Channel - Large Asteroid Impact Simulation (2008). Earth was born as a result of repeated asteroid collisions, the moon was created by a single giant impact event. Then, Earth's size attracted huge meteorites, which slammed into it, causing super-high-temperature rock vapour to cover the entire surface and evaporate all ocean water.

New Box

I'm working on a box that I see as more of a book.  I just completed the chapter on hands.  I am also creating a chapter on "heart" and a chapter on "mind" ...here is one of the small pieces from that box.  The original is 4 x 3.5 inches.  The photos of the little people are from an album of old family photos that a student, Chip, gave me.  The hands belong to my friend, Levi.

Interesting read...

I found Jake Romm's article about the subversive nature of Time Magazine's Trump cover particularly insightful.  of course, I'm talking about this photo:

Nutshell of his points...

1.  That the image is presented in a Kodachrome color palette -not something I would have noticed, btw- causing us to see the photo through whatever notions we have of the 1940's. 

2.  The pose and its relationship to other artworks depicting monarchs and leaders in seated positions.  His analysis of the power between the viewer and the subject of the photo, wherein the leader doesn't rise for the viewer -that the viewer must approach the leader... I also agree that there is a conspiratorial kind of expression generated by the looking-back-at-us body position as opposed to images of other leaders where we see them straight-on.

Romm also talks a bit about the shadow lurking in the background...I don't see any light source on the subject that would've cast that shadow, so adding it was a choice -a statement, if you will.

3.  THE CHAIR.  Which is one of the main things I noticed about the photo.  The back of it looks decayed...then your eyes go around and start noticing other things...like the chips in the paint.  And honestly, like the shadow.  For me, the decay on the back of the chair is so out of place that it causes me to closely observe the rest of the shot. 

Anyhow, worth thinking about.  Man, I love photography!

a part is still partly something that was felt or seen when it was blue or green, or: the dream of the bugs and the airfish

how many years had I walked past that house?
how many lifetimes?
with how many lovers, friends, parents, siblings?
it stood on lill st in chicago, on delaware park in buffalo, mesita in el paso…
it never changes.
flakey-gray clapboard, green gables…i never knew: was the gray really just dingy weathered white? i suppose it doesn’t matter.

i am small. both of my hands are being held…by my mother on one side and my father on the other. and we are gliding down the tree-lined sidewalk. it is spring; short puffy sleeves and patent leather sandals, boys on boards, cats in windows and all of us responding quite nobly to the urge of life, if you will...gliding, gliding…and there, on the corner, gray clapboard and the brush of weeping birch on shingles.
“can we go home now, mom?”
“why of course, dear, where else would we go?”
and we approached the gray clapboard building and glided like so much silk onto the front porch.
“hey!” my father said, “i have an idea!!! let’s act like our neighbors do and go through the front door!” he opened the front door as my mother and i landed with a little “plunk” onto our feet and walked into the wallpapered living room.

i am 13. i have not left the house in 23 years. the boards squeak when i walk…my cat has become so thin; all i can see of her is her shadow. and she hides a lot, right there, between the stove and the fridge. and my father wants to read his letters and i am standing at the dining room table, now collecting them from the vestibule, now bending to remove some he has taped to the underside of the table, now standing on a chair, peeling his letters from the ceiling, when . . .

i am 23 and standing on a chair peeling letters from the ceiling. i have not left the house in 37 years and the wallpaper is dark and blistered. and now…

i am 37. i have not left the house in 20 years. sunshine and dust motes twirling in the air; wilted tulips. the sound of stephen drury’s leather pants squeaking away on a piano bench, of people fucking in the women’s room at limelight & me, too many cocktails later carving yeats onto a cell wall with a safety pin, and now standing on a chair peeling letters from the ceiling, when…

i am 20. and i am standing on a chair peeling my dad’s letters from the ceiling. when…
skrittll-sssskiiit-sss-s—sshussiktip
shissss-shussik-ssss-ss
skutskitssss-sss-sitchshusi
and a throb
and a push
and the stained yuckiness of urine soaked paper and plaster. i peel an envelope from the ceiling and
the sounds
skrittll-sssskiiit-sss-s—sshussiktip
shissss-shussik-ssss-ss
. . . when
a hole opens up in the ceiling, small. but there: the movement of shiny blackness, and a sense of overwhelm as plaster whitens my hair, the hole crumbles on, as thin, black, bodies and feathery articulated legs now emerging, pushing themselves through the hole.
oh fuck.
FUCK.
and i start screaming and yelling and my dad freaking out, thinks i’m hurt, and the weight of the bodies, their blind, instinctive urge to emerge, and the wetness of the plaster, my heart the breeding ground and stable for an infinitude of conflicting beliefs, sensations and emotions, the chair quite rickety, i come crashing to the ground just as the entire ceiling collapses under the weight of 1000’s of enormous, black cockroach-like beetles loading themselves through the hole at the speed of darkness. and i am lying there, panic stricken, screaming, screaming, screaming.
my father.
a tank of green poison.
and a landscape of belly-side-up, legs now helplessly scrunched, bespeckling the squeaky floorboards singly, in pairs & small colonies and i wonder if bugs have families, too.
and dad, my hero, still needs his letters.
and so
i say
how about a glass of water instead?
“ok” he says; he loves me.
and in the kitchen. . .
skrittll-sssskiiit-sss-s—sshussiktip
shissss-shussik-ssss-ss
skutskitssss-sss-sitchshusi
and screaming,
and green tanks,
and more dead bodies.
our house is filled with poison.
our house is filled with poison.
our house is filled with poison.

*** *** ***
i am 37b. i am 23. i am 48; i am a'. i am upstairs, lying on my bed supine. eyes watching, ears listening. and yes, i can hear the sounds of the living and the dead. can see the shimmering energies of earth-bound things and in my mind's eye, bodies boiling in thick green goo downstairs and the bones of my ancestors exhumed now by curious anthropologists . . .they can't help it. . .driven by human frailty on their quest for answers to the mystery of human existence, they dig.
they measure.
they perform multifarious carbon dating procedures on minute shards of pottery.
they study the relation of bodies to artifacts and archeological structures.
elaborate charts and graphs are drawn that have as much to do with existence as about the tartness of cherry pie. and still there are bugs. they press on and on; they are upstairs now. why? because there is no method for control. that's why. hose 'em down with the green stuff in one place, they scatter and multiply in another.
i am afraid of the bugs.
i am afraid of the blisters in the wallpaper.
i am afraid of the bespectacled anthropologists and of the invisibility of my mother.
and
i can't stay in this bed, worn springs, host to hundreds of anonymous couplings eons old, to my grandmother's final dusty gasp, no.
back downstairs...my chair is still in the middle of the dining room, my dad's letters have all surrendered and have dropped from the ceiling, blistered wallpaper has now sweat itself free and underneath i see the wall is plastered with 1000's of statistical charts, graphs, bar and pie diagrams, all squashed together in a sea of nonsensical relations. the radio is playing billie holiday's 'strange fruit,' but both of my parents are missing and i wonder who billie is singing to. the floor looks like a battleground. and me on the chair peering into the hole from which the first onslaught of bugs raged forth. and movement, still.
frightened, i hit the floor running. to return with my dad's green tank in hand, only...no bugs, but large, brown fish floating through the hole and now happily swimming through the air above the dining room table. WOOOOOOOOW! they are so WEIRD!!! so puffy, like brown balloons with fish faces... and i get really close to one, and look at it and realize that the scales are arranged in whorls. and from this distance i also see that it is not just brown, but many shades of brown & rust & metallic copper, here & there the copper gleams green like an oil slick. i wonder if they act like balloons. and i take my hand and gently hit one on the face. and yes, it moves backwards like a balloon, but: horrified expression, and:
"do NOT hit me in the face...in fact, NEVER HIT ME ANYWHERE."
"ooooooh noooooo, i'm so sorry...please forgive; i didn't know you were...um...like, alive."
"are you stupid?"
"maybe. what are you? i mean, i've never seen any of your kind."
"i am an airfish." she said, and she puffed herself up, her scales lifting from her body, and beneath them, silver and copper accentuating the darkness of her scales. "and i am beautiful."
"you were beautiful before you puffed yourself up, you know."
and she smiled broadly.
"so, i have never seen one of your kind either, yet i could sense your beingness (it's why we came out, actually)" and her sisters meandered over in their airfish-swimway, all with different scale arrangements. "...yet, i would never have hit YOU in the face....say, what happened to your wallpaper? we much prefer the floral motif."
and before my eyes, the graphs and charts and diagrams, the statistics & figurings & and very important calculations began to mutate. they grew, they stretched themselves beyond their former incarnation as dissheveled scraps into the unlikliest of ornate floral scrollwork, becoming nonsense entwined with nonsense, entwined with sweat, entwined with tears, entwined here with the cilia of 2 paramecium and there with dust of granite, my walls an ocean of...
"smith?" my airfish wants me.
"yes?"
"i give you three gifts: 1. the gift of this wallpaper. it contains secrets beyond the numbers themselves and beyond their new configurations. the answers lie in their relation: every bit to every bit, every interim to every interim, and every bit to every interim. you are unable to know it; physically, it is too large to be accomodated by the tools you were given in this existence. your friends, the writers and scholars among you will approach the wallpaper with their magnifying glasses extended, and all of them will see a different fragment, magnified...the more any individual knows or purports to know about the minutia of a single locus, the less they know of its meaning in the larger cosmos. you see, each locus is inextricably bound to the interims embedded within it and to the bits and interims in every other speck of the galaxy. know this: all stories are particles of other stories. and be delighted: because, yes...there IS more. don't trust your scholars for they know as much as you do. do not waste time quoting them. do not waste time quoting me. hear the multitude of voices; within it, that of your mother, that of your teacher, that of your student, that of your trees, bushes, giraffes and beagles.
the second two gifts are things your friends will call "faith"
gift #2: know this: you are an airfish, waiting to be born.
gift #3: and this: the bit that goes unnoticed is called the "interim." the interim is NOT an absence.
and with that she brushes herself against my cheek.
"do you want to remember me?"
"yes."
and she presses herself first against my left cheek and then against my right. and then she and her sisters swim into the walls their particles disbursing, now joining with the tendrils and scrollwork of my wallpaper.