︱tape: 07 - hey, can you hear me?︱

when i was younger, i made sense of things through flat images. looking out of car windows to buildings and streets piling up to the hills like a grassy tide, their hush would seem so near, the smears on the glass polished with warmth leaving glowing strands against the sky. hills ebbed and flowed at 100 km/h out of their still bumps across the highway from the car’s side windows that opened pockets through the dark interior with a glimpse of all the shifting city blocks that flattened to the suburbs and the perpetual wither of yellow lawns. the expanse of meadows stretched around me, the wooden floor of our unfinished home pointed at the corners.

watching tv, the connection wasn’t very stable. sometimes my dad smacked the set and it would make a hollow sound, as if those colourful images were powered by nothing. in winter i use the bus to get around, grime scrambles the image from the windows passing identical houses and trash cans but with tail-lights of cars on the driveway blushing through the smudge as the bus rolls through slush like static and i thought of warmth conducting on metal and hidden exit doors.

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i tell you this at meyrin’s open mic night where a bland flat screen offsets the glimmering bottles on a pub’s classic veneer casing. you laugh a little bit just out of the absurdity of such a comparison but then glance outward to the car park out the window. so afterward, we look at all the closed buildings and we tell each other where we would be going in secret like we had to remind ourselves that the future existed not like how all the dilapidated brick of the town area seemed too much like the ragged past we tried to extricate ourselves from but more of a ‘we could go places kinda thing’ and let ourselves unravel from the endless intersections with stained bus-stops where nothing happens. maybe it’s the courage of liquor or something like that even though we knew houses were expensive and yet some of us even talk about rooming up as if fulfilling an old wish of perpetual sleepovers. then i feel a little lighter. a guy across the street reminds me of shotarou’s absent looks across the intersection as if waiting for an epiphany. then you bump into me and i try my best to catch up as the sidewalk extends a little forward up to the limit of the earth. it almost seemed that maybe whatever i had lost, i could find again in the distant auburn trees. by then, you’re all already ahead of me.

if i tell you this, i think something might move. this thing now put into words only to open a gaping cavity: a privileged look into an empty vase like the one in shotarou’s house where you were tall enough to look down only to reveal a sash of stained porcelain at the bottom. i take photos through a bottomless vase and i get this photo of you. a second where the shape of your face bends another way that doesn’t seem like you as the room blooms in colour and i looked closer to see if your face could melt into a shape that i recognized, more an orb within a bokeh that aligned these polygons as if entire planets but instead seeing going through the room like the blade of a spear and if there would be someone that we’d injure somehow even in the smallest of points of contact, and i’d be really concerned about your contours, the ways you looked in my mind.