Where You'll Find Me
in dreams
It was hard to distinguish daytime and nighttime
when I spent every moment of it in the same room.
I could sleep no matter it is the sun or the moon outside my window. I had nothing to do.
18.03.2020
A stranded body turns into a closed room,
The mind circulates back and forth on
Penrose Stairs.
Day 2 of Obligatory Home Quarantine.
The host of the virus shuts herself
inside a box, clearing off all disturbance.
Of hygiene, of noise, of heartthrobs.
She filters all that is brought forward.
In purity's tightening space, something
ebbs further and further away.
I stared at my room for so long the furnitures began to disappear. I imagined igniting little fires on the damp marks of time and dust. Fires left me soil, soil grows me a forest of magic. Roots and branches will press against the confined walls, their sprawling energy breaking through for sunshine. Someday.
As I sat everyday with the bed, the chair, the desk, the lamp, the shelves and the wardrobe, they became my limbs. They became talkative at daytime, and drooped wearily as the sun left the room.
I saw no one, for 7 days now. I visited my nightmares, tucked under the bed and behind the closet. Hello hello hello, they spoke in tones from different stages of my life. What were you doing faraway? One piped up, asking me nosy questions. Why are you here? Did you fail at something? Look at those anxious marks scrawled all over your legs! They pointed and exclaimed dramatically, Now you're locked up just as we are! I can't storm away and slam the door, the way I used to.
It was Day 12 when I heard his voice from another confined room. As usual, I took my morning temperature (36.4 degrees); I thanked the counselor for her daily check up calls, then my phone dinged with his casual message. "Casual reply", he would correct me if he reads this, "You texted me first", he would insist.
Yes, there is denial even from the start of our encounter. I would hate myself if we can only decide that we were *meant to be* thanks to this isolation policy. I would complain our fate for choosing his side and not mine, for leaving me with no choice because I had been locked up for too long and I need interaction desperately. Fate leaves me with no choice and I hate that I wanted it.
Sometimes I closed my eyes and imagined running through a forest, her branches caressing me.
But after knowing him (in confinement), my imaginary running was disturbed.
He would catch me, he would find me and claim himself as my freedom.
I panicked. Quarantine suddenly was keeping me safe from another type of capture.
He has his eye on an ordinary blue flower. He carries a sun with him,
so bright that no one can see its sad face. He tatooed thorns on his chest and they became real monsters. Imprinted and destined.
I see through his monsters, they bore me, but still enough to entertain under quarantine. I reached out to another human being, but instead of feeling warmth from the skin and the heart, I feel cement. My fortress grew and expanded, I did not.
Isolation creates desire. But when it doesn't, it creates a second layer of isolation. We became our own prey. We tortured ourselves when we realized the other person isn't the given answer. The last time I reached out, he was already closed off, into somewhere tighter than his quarantine hotel room.
"N'y a-t-il pas dans l'architecture elle-même la présentification de la douleur?", asked Lacan, on the petrified pain of Daphne, after she transformed her pain into a tree of bursting branches.
The prison carries the pain of the isolated body. The castle holds its damsel in distress. To break through an architecture of pain, become the architecture itself. What immobilized me is an invisible capture - virus, human interaction, intimacy. I paint them on canvas so they become their own solidified forms. As I put down my brush, I found myself outside.