I shot a roll of film today, in an exhilarating moment between the golden hour and dusk when the sun sinks low enough to slip below the insulating cloud cover and strike one side of everything. It happened during an equally exhilarating moment, the several minutes before I had to be at work, once within whose bounds the time outside ceases to signify. After a whole day indoors, to step out to that startling, peach-toned half-light of winter dusk is both liberation and disorientation anew.
The things I accumulated to say were lost in half-snatches.
It started with an emotionally and visually disorienting dream, in which I was displaced, entering a new-old house lush with objects of significance I couldn't parse. Walls of art, beds of cushions, tablefuls of bottles stripped of their labels but bearing illegible replacement names. The house was described to me as a tunnel, a gradation of ghosts, but in reality it was a snail's-shell calyx, spiraling in and enveloping in layers what was or was not to exist. We sat on the bed, knees and knuckles. The big question, unconsummated, expired at dawn impaled upon the alien status of my awakeness. I didn't know what I wanted but I was not afraid to trail it by only its indices and my periods of patience.
This is not how I usually feel, and I remembered it after waking up but could no longer feel what it meant. This brought on a whole day of reactionary confusion and repressed anxiety. But now remembering, the dream's weirdness and discomforts had a rightness the usual anguished not-knowing lacks. There's more than one way to be, in the dark.
I am trying to learn to make mistakes.
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