At times I need space from the self.
When the past is too present and the future too pressing. When I am suffocated by the confines of this body and its place in our history.
I understand the impulse toward the chemical. The desire to push the brain when it will not follow, to numb when it will not settle.
But mostly I find solace in the other.
I am not this person caught in the long, empty hours of a rainy weekend with only my treacherous mind to guide me. I am not on the 728 bus rattling through downtown LA, pressed to the Hispanic woman clutching a bright white orchid beside me. I am not on this gray couch, listening to light classical under these fluorescent lights, waiting for a therapist to emerge from behind that over-sized wooden door.
I am an unnamed, genderless lover. I am fidelity and seduction and the sickness of longing. I am a middle-aged Chief Inspector contemplating the humanity of our darkest impulses over café au lait. I am a young boy slipping between Anywheres, tricked out of lives for the monetary profit of a weak uncle.
I am all these things and nothing. Lives flicked on and off by the turning of a page.
I am a story I write myself. My narrative alive and ever changing. I am more than this one self and the actions that have led to this one present. I am the impulse behind the pen, the brush, the key tick. A moving, nebulous thing. Not the body, but a tale the body weaves. Caught in snapshots, but renewed each time the shutter clicks. Never quite containable. Always, wonderfully, incomplete.
*****
This amigurumi bookworm was made freehand with small amounts of green and black Sugar ‘n Cream cotton and a US 7/4.5mm crochet hook. Glasses are made by curving a paperclip around an over-sized sharpie and held in place with hot glue. The book is made of small scraps of pink and white felt.
The books I reference here are a few of my current favorites:
- Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
- Still Life by Louise Penny
- The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones
