on space
excerpt from an unpublished journal — Spring 2023
Something happens to me when I leave this space. Maybe it’s the sunlight or the coffee or the drive…everything starts to look different. My soul unfolds and becomes something I can feel and hear again. Images pass through my mind like rain over dry ground. Life becomes more than bareable. It’s something wild and beautiful and desired. Then I come back, and I step inside this studio, take off my coat, sit down by the work, and in a moment, all that was brought to life outside this space dies again.
The life in me dries up between these walls. I have all the room and time to experiment, to lose myself in anything. I can dance or paint all over myself, and instead, this terrible feeling of dread begins to pour into me and my body becomes heavy like a sack filled with water. I do everything to numb my way through the fear that comes to me. And the things I do turn me into a shadow of myself. If this were Wings of Desire and there was one of those tender angels watching me in the corner of the room, he’d be dying of boredom.
I knew when things were worthwhile, and I lived. Those were the times I’d always have my camera nearby, documenting everything. I knew what I’d built was good, and rare. I wanted to hold every moment of it. Now I only want to take the day and pour it out of the window the way they used to do with dirty water in Syria after a good mop. I don’t want to touch any of those hours, I want none of it to be remembered. They are wasted, and the waste is painful. It’s like a bad song that keeps playing over and over again on a broken stereo. And if I can’t make it stop, maybe the only thing I can do is walk out of the place…
It feels like what I'm given of love and what I’ve tasted of life, rather than settling a little of the hunger has made it even more monstrous, more needy. Now I know. In some ways, being given a little is worse than nothing at all. It reminds you of all that you need. To receive nothing is to forget what it is you’d set out to find for yourself. To not be loved for a little each week, to not be spoken to and heard in such a profound way for an hour, to not sit in the sun, to not have touched a man you loved 8 months ago…to have none of these things keeps something in you comfortably dead and out of the way. But to taste a little of all this, and to not have nearly as much of it as you need, it’s torture. It’s easier to bare hunger when there’s nothing nearby to smell.
