pink palace/empty head

Photography_Collaboration with Nathan Armstrong

PINK PALACE
I think sometimes about the person who moved here in 1974, when the room was new, in their new wig and hat, with a pair of gloves to match the floor when the carpet was a different shade of pink. Before the counters were swollen or the tiles chipped. There weren’t charms tucked in the fixtures back then, or friction lines of cats on the walls.

I wonder if they’re still living. I haven't been able to leave here for trying, maybe that happens to some of us—like her, I’ll step just right one day and dissolve into the carpet. We’ll all meet in plush space, our heads thrumming as static passes unimpeded through. Our eyes cloudy in a vapour of spilt wine and cat hair.

It’s so soft though—every direction is something to sink into, a long, enveloping embrace in days over decades. It stays warm either way, the sheets are drawn over now to the warp and weft edges of the place. When we clink our heads together we remember how sharp it can be out there. Our laughter just sounds like fuzzy breathing. Our crying just sounds like fuzzy breathing. I'm moving out some time, but I know I'm just not ready yet.

HEAD EMPTY
Days before, in response to an impossible situation, whoever I was stepped out and, in a drawn-out way, I came back. I was having trouble knowing what was real. I’d cut everything out—chemically my body was in total disarray. In spirit withdrawing from the feeling of a realized existence. 

I was reading about how self-concept and personal history deny us the power to be what we might need to be. I wonder about how demonic possession has been described—I expect the real people behind those stories are something more sympathetic. They had the power to become something wholly unlike what they were in response to the violence of the world they were in.

At the same time we aren't mineral with permanent identities shaped by pressure and heat, we're plural across our time and experience, orbiting the truth on various levels, falling and returning. Projecting images of stability in our dream of a motionless world. 

The action of sitting for the camera though—wearing the costume of my absent self, being still in my home, taking simple instructions from a friend—was so peaceful despite how things had been.