03.05.08

03.05.08
Oh, I, I love you still. Your brown hair that dangles with an air of being unkempt but is secretively stylized. Your lips that look swollen. Your deep-set eyes that pull one in, instead of cast one toward the outside world. Your room of mirrors, where you spend more time observing yourself than even I, the female. Your towering canvas of art, where I can find my name mingled between the heavy prose. Did you really write me inside the art of your life? Are we, together, a purpose of and in art? I still love your bedroom and the stairs that led us up into seclusion. There were no windows, no light to tells us when. Lovers don’t consider time. We were left all alone, avoiding everything but the bodies of ourselves. Your bookshelves heavy with praise and you translating to me in English. The meaning felt different. Your single bed, fallen flat on the floor. You said you were embarrassed. I wondered how you could be. And then you thanked me for being in your space, inside your world, for spending the night, for falling for a while. Our bodies tangled and posing, I could still see the spine of the poetry volume you read from. I will never forget hearing, seeing and knowing to remember his name, Saul Williams. There are lines that I still tie back to you. They are nothing tangible without you. They mean nothing without our memories. You slept and I was kept up to the sound of your snores and the unbelievable reality that I am here—there—sharing space and invited to sleep beside you, watching with one woken eye, taking mental notes to remember this by.

~

I remember writing the above. It was a spring afternoon in Chelsea, Manhattan. My sister and I had been running around for art direction finds. I was in a warehouse with two stories devoted to props new—mainly old—for films. We wandered off separately, her with her list and me with my camera. Letting our eye’s curiosity take us in different directions. Then, I sat on the pink stairwell and wrote the above, knowing at the time how silly it is and thinking how trite it was. But now reading it, I still know how silly it is, yet that is the reason to love it, for it’s innocence, imperfections, candidness. But it was not trite—those moments all proved to be important and engraining, they were unique for me—personal in their own right—and the memory still feels fresh, ever changing but continually surprising. I wish I could remember more of everything. But I am always left with gaps, dips in time, questions and it is then that my imagination—my hopes and fears of character—fill the moment’s factuality.