The Brooklyn Rail

Moving images. Stills.
A volcano. A prison. An object of desire-fear. The horizon transmutes to a cage.
Endless reality, arbitrated through pictures; projected in absence.
A memory blurs. 
A failed attempt: incomplete.
Being elsewhere. Telling stories.
What was left out of the picture?
Who made the rules? Who decides what is to be done?
Does it make any difference?
Time runs slow. 
Push forward, push back, fast forward, interlude, teleport; jump.
Billions of geological years push against the never-ending minutes of solitude.
Time is measured in alien units. Did it remind them of childhood?
Seasons. Warm, then cold. Eternally freezing.
Tiresome attempts to find balance, deciding what to wear.
Trapped between opposites. No before, no after.
Stopping.
In a bathroom, they brush their teeth, they find the invisible them inside of a jumper.
An action, small, anchors.
Why do they refuse to tell a story? 
Being everywhere and nowhere.
Not want to return.
‘Hello?’
Is there a human on this island?
A black hole (or was it red?). A uterus.
The threat of the outside. 
The water—blue and boundless.
The wind—brutal.
The possibility of being devoured by natural forces.
Or sucked into an asphyxiating interior.
No central heating.
No open ends.
Silence suffocates.
Withdrawal? It helps them focus.
They meet people when they walk. Mild illusions of comfort.
Peripheries. Sharpening edges.
And intimacy?
Another story of comings and goings. There is no translation.
The island is multiple and contradictory—could it be otherwise?
A mirror image. 
Let’s go back.
To the place where ‘we’ is possible,
where hope rehearses itself.
Blinded to the outside.
A landscape waiting to be wrapped in pink fabric.
The need to map a territory,
To belong. To leave marks.
To Possess, to tie a ribbon around it. 
The Smolder. The Dust. Black-and-white pictures.
Exhaustion exhumes itself.
Beauty in exile.
Under the volcano.
They could still cry after it all.
Shadows. Food. Oranges.
Trying to remember through memories of others.
Why not sing instead?
All that was lost is now within reach.
Existence, digested in the format of a grid. 
Icons, everywhere ready to be clicked.
Can they trust what they see? 
Another island experienced from a distance.
A house with many rooms, where every gesture leads to novel exploration.
A communal experience. Endless endlessness. 
A photocopy, a facsimile of a childhood.
Their assault narrated as if it were my own. 
A boy with dark curly hair, probably 4 years old, wears red pyjamas, holds a mop.
In the background is a kitchen table and a long wooden bench, a leather footstool with geometric patterns.
‘Are we there yet?’
Curiosity peaks to out of control levels.
Continuous is the present. Here comes the Dreamwork.