love, read, write

You are sitting in a patch of grass extending into the sea of asphalt. The sound of childhood and after-school tag rings far away in the background. Your fingers are planted into the dirt, tufts of green between your fingers: soft, like the fur of an animal. The entire lawn sways together, a single instrument wavering indecisively with the sweet wind that combs through your hair. Gleeful screeches echo in the distance, as if recalling a past that you remember as faintly as the little voices sound to you now.

A curious ant crawls up your index finger:

Hi, ____ – it's me. I didn't see you in class yesterday. Or last week. 

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"Autobiography is a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause." 
– Paul de Man, Autobiography as Defacement

I am editing a twenty-minute clip of my late lunch at a park in Sydney, one of many videos I took while traveling alone in Australia. It is two weeks after the events in the video. I have not eaten dinner. It is one in the morning. Tomorrow is Monday. None of these facts occur to me. There is a longing that drives me through this physical limbo into a deep investigation of many hours of footage. Clip after clip after clip. Watching, rewatching. Starving.

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the lights of this hotel room are dim. i feel surveilled under the strange fixtures on the ceiling, which likely serve a functional and necessary purpose, but to me, look like eyes. i am being watched. i am watching youtube, it is my last day in australia, i had promised myself not to go on social media during my vacation, yet here i am. in a strange hotel. watching a video, because watching other people's lives through a screen has become a habit that feels like home.

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