I remember that I once read about an architectural collective (I can’t remember their name) who described the ultimate impermanence of their work, and of any man-made structure for that matter, with poetics about buildings floating on the skin of the earth.
They don’t permeate the fabric of the planet deeply enough to last forever. Plates will shift, weather will wear and ultimately time will take them, will make them disappear…No matter how solid they seem to us right now.
I found this idea comforting. As frightened as I can be of change, the understanding that it happens… constantly, incrementally… is sort of wonderful. The unstuckness of everything is a privilege to know and to witness.
Even so, sometimes I long for things to stick.
I realised, as I got to know my way around a new friend’s cupboards, that I didn’t really know where any of your things lived.
As I got know which cup was where, which was the favourite one that I should let them use so the tea that I made for them in the home they were sharing with me while we talked would taste just that little bit better…I didn’t really know the favourite contents of your drawers, of your shelves, of the boxes sheltered under your bed.
And it felt like I had lost the map to those things in your head too. The excitements, the comforts, the little things that would raise a smile. A real smile, the kind that reaches all the way to your eyes even when the lips barely move.
I don’t really know how it happened but we had gotten to a point where I was floating on the skin of your life. I hadn’t permeated your world deeply enough to last any longer.
So here I was, foundations destroyed,
crashing to the earth,
crumbling down as dust.
I was
Un
Stuck.
The only thing to do now is wait and see what grows in the space that has opened on the skin.
Spring is coming,
And I watch closely for the first seedlings to break through and peek up at the lightening sky.
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