Flecks of paint

Flecks of paint gather beneath her nails. Seen through the ribbed thickness and mixed with oily dirt the small chips are less colourful and characteristic of an environment. They could bear no relationship to the series of opened apartments winding back amongst her drifts from the sea. Each door opens onto the same coloured passageway. The things you carry and collect grow quickly irrelevant. You continually attempt to ascribe to them an initial state born concurrent with your acquisition of them. Things do not have pasts, only the pasts they acquire by falling into your sequence. Where did you acquire that sequence. You reinvest in them a more appropriate purpose, trajectory. When you find things amiss, ensnared in new reeds, layed out on gleaming tile, you stutter, falter, you are ineffectual and you must change your trajectory to contain these closed systems, these dead ends. You reexamine the chain of causality. You were indeed there at its root, it has found you in these wanderings. You carry the paint chips ‘neath your nails, the evidence of your periodic return, or of the twisting back of these streets upon you, but in the forward movement of the sun and tides is an accretion of histories. She picks them out with her other fingernails. Passageway upon passageway each painted the same dry bone hue, yet different, as the sun falls away from them and their own lights arise.


Critical Response:

« | »