Santiago
In the audience of Grecian marble statues that stand apart not only through their bright whiteness, but also their unlikeness to any real people, we move from room to room. All of them are filled with photographic windows into other peoples lives, lives that seem so much more real, and people with deep lines carved into their faces, fear in their eyes and heavy hearts; some with love, others with hate. They stand fast in empty rooms, coloured paint peeling green and blue flakes like snow from the walls. You can read photographs as a timeline; follow them like lines in the faces of the old defiant women, women who lately have been worn away from the picture by a revolution. You can trace their disappearance frame by frame, until all that remains is an empty chair and a single light bulb that does little to illuminate, even after all this technology and time. New wars are still conducted with the same old dance steps, and the resolution never changes, because you cannot change something that doesn’t exist. The walls of the wet streets are painted in commemoration of one of many revolutions that occurred fifty years before the photograph was taken, yet the sentiment of struggle remains the same, ingrained into this new generation. It bleeds out of the blank faces that will forever be most effected by war; the poor. Anger will breed quicker when nurtured in the nest of poverty, a violence born from an already festering sense of unrest.
In the audience of Grecian marble statues that stand apart not only through their bright whiteness, but also their unlikeness to any real people, we move from room to room. All of them are filled with photographic windows into other peoples lives, lives that seem so much more real, and people with deep lines carved into their faces, fear in their eyes and heavy hearts; some with love, others with hate. They stand fast in empty rooms, coloured paint peeling green and blue flakes like snow from the walls. You can read photographs as a timeline; follow them like lines in the faces of the old defiant women, women who lately have been worn away from the picture by a revolution. You can trace their disappearance frame by frame, until all that remains is an empty chair and a single light bulb that does little to illuminate, even after all this technology and time. New wars are still conducted with the same old dance steps, and the resolution never changes, because you cannot change something that doesn’t exist. The walls of the wet streets are painted in commemoration of one of many revolutions that occurred fifty years before the photograph was taken, yet the sentiment of struggle remains the same, ingrained into this new generation. It bleeds out of the blank faces that will forever be most effected by war; the poor. Anger will breed quicker when nurtured in the nest of poverty, a violence born from an already festering sense of unrest.
Yet when the world is
plunged into great darkness, colour will be our saving grace, so we must be
brave enough to shine our light on it and not shy away.
And now there is you. There are so many things that
have happened since you have been away, but I will not be an exhibitionist and
publish them on the internet, I will keep them here for you if you decide to
return. When you were here, sometimes I had to untangle myself from you, from
your love, from our sublimed existence; I needed to stand apart from you and
inhabit the body of the observer. When I looked at you with distant eyes,
unclouded by memory or prejudice, it reminded me of how much I loved you. Then
everything would be just fine, but I needed you to be able to give me that
time, or my internal self would crumble and I would forget my maiden name. You
would have ceased to love me, because I would have ceased to be me. I would be
nothing more than an extension of you, a phantom limb, an annexed piece of your
soul in a pencil skirt and 4 inch heels. I still can’t wear heels. So I suppose this is where we differ, it is
our point of deviation; you believe that love will set us free, and I do not.
But now, I just wish that you would come home. I have
stories to tell you, too.
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