From
the ongoing works, “Untitled, Love Stories”
“You
might be my soul mate, but I’m looking for someone here on earth.” Her words
remained motionless. Even after the
expressions began to fade, he recalled touching the water in the bowl, look at
her while she spoke, his fingers brushing against the taut surface of the
water, trembling.
The
glass sat hunched on the table.
What
was divine was the idea – the thought that entered him in the night and left
him during the days, from his hands, the actualization of a piece of something
he could not determine the origin but knew right then that he needed to find
its form. It was lost. It was lost in time and in memory, the folded
layers of it, prying into the present, hoping for creation, the process of
finding what is lost, building it, and giving it a name, which is, in fact,
just recreation. Over and over. Water in a bowl.
Her
words reached him in those startling moments earliest in the day. It was then that he could put an image to her
face again. Her expressions escaped him,
and startled that he had forgotten her so quickly, he searched for the allowances
that forgetfulness gave him: a soft smile, a deep longing, a tear, “someone
here on earth” (For the optimists, the greatest achievement has been to keep
heaven beyond earth, to put it outside and away, so as to say, “This is not all
of it. Have hope. Live with your head burrowed in the sand and
your heart facing the skies. Carry
on.” For the other type of optimist, it
was the myth which tethered and chained the spirit to a rock that sank beneath
the river of inaction, anxiety, and most dangerously of all, ambivalence. To those others, they wanted to shout, “Be
free! There is nothing but chaos!”).
He looked
at the water in the bowl. It was
motionless. He sighed on it and watched
the surface tease, relax and then tremor again, looking up at the moon, then at
the stars, then at the sun, and finally at the grey clouds which turned into
night. De
profundis clamavi.
That
night he dreamed that he was falling through the ceiling of his room, and as
the walls swallowed him, he grabbed onto the tapestries that clung to his
windows, light things he hadn’t noticed before.
And as he grabbed onto them, the tapestries wrapped themselves around
him, and he fell, slowly falling through the walls, while the tapestries began
to dance on him, touching his hands, feet and neck, brushing his collapsed
torso and sliding along his body (a rock fell in the pile of ashes, and as the
rock hit the ash, the ash kicked up into a dance, rising. The ash always rises; the rock always falls),
until suddenly, as he was falling, her image rose above him entangled in the
tapestries. He clasped at her.
That
morning, he woke with the feeling that suddenly, he had lost a thing infinitely
loving, infinitely touching, and never once a thing he could call his own.
