Blink

To be called into participation one thing at a time. Each thing a depositing into the graininess of the day here  and just here. Each call to attendance a jump-start out of that fitting enclave into a tangential repose. This effortless cruising with no mind of where to go. It's the same all the time and every day this yawning out from a belly-flop and rising on the inertia of a grating crayon. It skids and catches across the coloration bleeding through the paper done many months ago and left, seeming complete there and then in the light and playful bouncing refraction of a summers day. But here, submerged in the rain and the comforting oppression that this sends out, after a sleepless night of door slamming from the flat below, with preparation of food underway- an inclination to move on the stuckness of this harsh febrile receptivity that jolts the body into spasm after spasm until the anticipated fright is all the way through  in muscles held before the covers of a duvet are ever felt- this sense of aloneness giving rise to specualtions that bleed out into the night; the peeping of car horns as the last party-goers return in the early hours. Then the wind that is shaking the window frame creating a vibrationary buzz where the seal is just off touching.Liike a whistling through the teeth that is making my gums tired.

Now I pull out this piece of color-stained blotting paper on the very next day. I sink into it, the vibrancy of sunshine long gone. But there is this harsh clarity- like lines cutting across the surface- joining by demarcating, demarcating by joining  patches of color that read like temperature; the hot and the cold mixed up but never becoming each other. I take a piece of brown crayon from the draw, lay the paper on my table and begin to cut into it, like a skater whose journey is frozen here and there in the skid-marks and lingering turns that line and dot  the icy but glowing white surface. What is creating these turns and stops, hesitations and jumps?
I don't know. I am there involved  in this fragment and then in that fragment over and over again, layering up coordinates that  have a sense of their own. I am riding them not driving them. But every now and then I linger long enough to notice, like a refrain- a glance or a reaching, a descending downwards or a levitation  like something scattering and expanding and these channels intersperse and coordinate one another. Other colored crayons, specifically this color or that are one at a time layered over like a new film of transparency that is superimposed and by degrees brings into confluence some kind of  pulsing that could be read as depth or could just be the flaying end-pieces of a long departed encounter. But the contact is written here and now, riffing off from one another into the pools of color that followed their own kind of hopping  immersive dance there on that sunny day- a year now gone and never to be repeated..

When I stand back I hear the rain still coming down evenly bracketing this locality in a vaporous  humid perspiration that never lets up then exceeding its own inclusiveness and breaking out into the out-beyond, a haze of indeterminacy that goes on and on and on stretching past you and I where even vision even recognition gives up on itself losing interest in distractions that root you to the spot. People stay indoors. Curtains are late to be pulled back. A solitary figure in green-  a skinny young man with a black mop of hair hanging out of  the window drawing deeply on a cigarette, puffing the excess into the damp air. It is Sunday, past 1. o'clock. Lunchtime played out in so many different ways in the households and assemblages of individuals gathered as one or pocketed off into autonomous units- all staying home today. This great wait- this pause for warmth; the fragile coldness of late winter. But it should be spring I hear someone say in the shop on the corner. A holiday in Spain- but there are so many things to organize- so many decisions to make- who has the time? who has the money these days?

I venture to see or perhaps I imagine or dream some kind of repository of half-formed gestures leaning towards one another out from that piece of paper, bouncing and jostling between up and down until they are all suspended in the colored clouds that still seem to be reorganizing. The warmth of a bygone summer and the wet cold drizzle of a late winter just before the spring kicks in somehow interacting and meshing through one another.Not touching but through this interval,  hollowing out a kind of lost space that perhaps never was really lost or perhaps can't be found. The haziness of relaxation and the clarity that is a definitive line almost like a shock and that verges - in this isolation- on the neurotic; the constant replay of lines taking up the pulse of one another but going nowhere. Then I see a face yawning through the haze- a face yawning through the vibrancy of colors;  temperature gauges. Drifting before breaking up and disappearing in a thousand other coordinates- like constellations in the night sky dream-filled with color that come and go and are never decided upn. Is it real or is it a figment of our imagination? It is neither. It is both. I feel some kind of yearning- years gone past, years to follow. But today there is a pause gap- a cloudburst evaporating back to naught in the blink of an  eye.