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Description
0. Distribution

You slowly begin to consider your relative positions.

The meaning of the alert in your email inbox begins to change.

In fragments, Life begins to replace Art in your discussions, just as you begin to bring what you've learned through Art into your life: all the melodramas, wishes, and conflicts. You learn each others' addresses, voices, and the space between you, in distance, in age, and in philosophy, becomes activated.

1. Gesture

We go back to basics. Let go of what you think it looks like. There, a skinny woman with long red hair walking, the wrong direction, in the waiting lounge. Your misconceptions only confuse your hand. Here: accept her as she is, standing before you, living Galatea. Your imagination's simplifying hand never put those spots on her cheek, that colour in her eyes. You were not able to sculpt her full shape and size from the 2-D, thin-obsessed world. So start over, with the essence of her seeping into your knowledge.

You must learn how to look again. Life-size, you try to make sense of her in flashes from the curve of your eye as you embrace, walk side by side, and you marvel at what you've gained by losing that picture, losing the distance.

2. Weight

The springiness of the bed sinks as you sit side by side. She's said once, she wants to be a size 12, but you've blocked it out. You've never thought of her as fat. You consider your own concerns about the state of your thighs, the Freshman Fifteen, and wish you could have hands and feet that don't freeze after 15 minutes' sitting still. You feel her sink into two pillows. The softness of her hair, damp in places.

The heaviness of her head and voice as she looks at her mother's kitchen table and confides in her blood brother, and her mother, and... you. Her boss, the cruel, womanizing fuck. Not at work, but here, makes her cry. You consider the weight of your own experiences with bullying, misogyny, homophobia. Doesn't even tip the scale. You don't know if reaching out for her hand would intrude, here in her mother's house. You would have surely felt it, the weight of her troubles – picking at dinner, dealing with that bastard – settle on your shoulders, willingly on your part, like a happy stone.

3. Blind Contour

Again, but at a different edge of the spectrum jewel, you must start over.

This can't be art you may say, it's nothing like what it actually looks like, or what you know it should look – well, you've become used to simplifying, Everybody is Doing It. Everywhere, or at least in the mass media, only the edges are shown, things become symbols of themselves. When you start paying attention to the actual thing – in this case, the surface, the changes in topography, the rhythm of ridges and dips – you become surprised by how practical it is, how ordinary. This isn't art – or at least how you think of art – this is the everyday, the real-time, the practical switch and flow of your eyes, your hand, your pencil. Little wobbles and variations are the mark of a slow, careful, sensitive line.

It's tiring. Sometimes you lose the flow. Breathe, reposition your eyes, mind, and hand, and start again. You'll end up with something that looks like inexpert crochet work, loosely tangled yarn. It looks like her hair as you fall asleep.

4. Positive/Negative Space, specifically Figure-Ground Reversal

Let me start near the end:

I miss my flight because I arrived too late to check in. I don't know if you, standing miles back from the service desk and the clerk with the dry straw mustache and ice-blue eyes, heard the reason. As we walked back towards the train station, I felt like I was walking beside a ghost. I thought I'd resigned myself to sleeping on a plane without you that night, it wasn't fair, to be given this life bonus – surely a sign of an even more challenging battle up ahead. By the time we got home, it was dark.

My more-permanent home is in stark contrast. Like a pool of black ink, it, the icy background that I sink into. I have tens of obligations, things to remember, each day. I barely know my suite-mates' names. This is not home, this is Hell; it wasn't "solid flame" or "darkness visible" that defined Hell, it was the absence of YHVH.

"I live in Hell,
cause I've been expelled
from Heaven"

In the bathroom, the bright fluorescent lights rush to fill the darkness, the hominess, of your things. I will myself to see your absence, to really see the air you could be displacing. I think of the things I wanted to spend more time on with you, and I think of the silences and immobility that instead filled those spaces and places. And I am content to know that they were not ill-spent – were not what most people would construe as lack of affection, awkwardness, or neglect – they were comfortable. Invisibly bridged with warmth, we now knew how to sense the precise distance between us, no distance at all.

Description
0. Distribution

You slowly begin to consider your relative positions.

The meaning of the alert in your email inbox begins to change.

In fragments, Life begins to replace Art in your discussions, just as you begin to bring what you've learned through Art into your life: all the melodramas, wishes, and conflicts. You learn each others' addresses, voices, and the space between you, in distance, in age, and in philosophy, becomes activated.

1. Gesture

We go back to basics. Let go of what you think it looks like. There, a skinny woman with long red hair walking, the wrong direction, in the waiting lounge. Your misconceptions only confuse your hand. Here: accept her as she is, standing before you, living Galatea. Your imagination's simplifying hand never put those spots on her cheek, that colour in her eyes. You were not able to sculpt her full shape and size from the 2-D, thin-obsessed world. So start over, with the essence of her seeping into your knowledge.

You must learn how to look again. Life-size, you try to make sense of her in flashes from the curve of your eye as you embrace, walk side by side, and you marvel at what you've gained by losing that picture, losing the distance.

2. Weight

The springiness of the bed sinks as you sit side by side. She's said once, she wants to be a size 12, but you've blocked it out. You've never thought of her as fat. You consider your own concerns about the state of your thighs, the Freshman Fifteen, and wish you could have hands and feet that don't freeze after 15 minutes' sitting still. You feel her sink into two pillows. The softness of her hair, damp in places.

The heaviness of her head and voice as she looks at her mother's kitchen table and confides in her blood brother, and her mother, and... you. Her boss, the cruel, womanizing fuck. Not at work, but here, makes her cry. You consider the weight of your own experiences with bullying, misogyny, homophobia. Doesn't even tip the scale. You don't know if reaching out for her hand would intrude, here in her mother's house. You would have surely felt it, the weight of her troubles – picking at dinner, dealing with that bastard – settle on your shoulders, willingly on your part, like a happy stone.

3. Blind Contour

Again, but at a different edge of the spectrum jewel, you must start over.

This can't be art you may say, it's nothing like what it actually looks like, or what you know it should look – well, you've become used to simplifying, Everybody is Doing It. Everywhere, or at least in the mass media, only the edges are shown, things become symbols of themselves. When you start paying attention to the actual thing – in this case, the surface, the changes in topography, the rhythm of ridges and dips – you become surprised by how practical it is, how ordinary. This isn't art – or at least how you think of art – this is the everyday, the real-time, the practical switch and flow of your eyes, your hand, your pencil. Little wobbles and variations are the mark of a slow, careful, sensitive line.

It's tiring. Sometimes you lose the flow. Breathe, reposition your eyes, mind, and hand, and start again. You'll end up with something that looks like inexpert crochet work, loosely tangled yarn. It looks like her hair as you fall asleep.

4. Positive/Negative Space, specifically Figure-Ground Reversal

Let me start near the end:

I miss my flight because I arrived too late to check in. I don't know if you, standing miles back from the service desk and the clerk with the dry straw mustache and ice-blue eyes, heard the reason. As we walked back towards the train station, I felt like I was walking beside a ghost. I thought I'd resigned myself to sleeping on a plane without you that night, it wasn't fair, to be given this life bonus – surely a sign of an even more challenging battle up ahead. By the time we got home, it was dark.

My more-permanent home is in stark contrast. Like a pool of black ink, it, the icy background that I sink into. I have tens of obligations, things to remember, each day. I barely know my suite-mates' names. This is not home, this is Hell; it wasn't "solid flame" or "darkness visible" that defined Hell, it was the absence of YHVH.

"I live in Hell,
cause I've been expelled
from Heaven"

In the bathroom, the bright fluorescent lights rush to fill the darkness, the hominess, of your things. I will myself to see your absence, to really see the air you could be displacing. I think of the things I wanted to spend more time on with you, and I think of the silences and immobility that instead filled those spaces and places. And I am content to know that they were not ill-spent – were not what most people would construe as lack of affection, awkwardness, or neglect – they were comfortable. Invisibly bridged with warmth, we now knew how to sense the precise distance between us, no distance at all.