From the Window

The lustre of melancholy. Perhaps that same lustre will one day reduce all places to a dim luminosity on the horizon. All places directed toward the same tragic end, broken from their site, and subordinated to an amorphous mass. In the meantime, the days are getting longer. But so too is the grey sky, which has been dispatched to drop humid rain over the balcony. Tonight, the window is open and the fire escape is visible. The tip of a coffee machine my brother bought me in 2006 is poking out, its dereliction a result of my caffeine intolerance. From down below, the smell of burnt sugar and oats is coming in. My head is positioned outside of the window and the rain is collecting in an empty glass Pepsi bottle. But there is no food here, only unopened tins of inedible materiality.

The End of Days? No, just the end of this day –this month –this table. “Soon there will be nothing where there never was anything.” But the substance of a life endures. With it, a disarming asymmetry runs parallel: my body yearns to be a site of inhabitation, but the inhabitation transcends the limits of my body, positioning itself in an underground region prior to all awareness. Alas, the indifference of all human places passes through us, oblivious to the sediment we deposit in the walls and doors. Unaffected by the outburst of human emotion, the world of things and memories remains static, poised in its global coldness. But no cosmic void can subdue the human craving for stone, cotton, and wood to reciprocate our affections. The chair that becomes an extension of my being; the balcony that becomes my thinking ground; the window that becomes a glance inwards—all follies in the wasteland of desire and memory.