Drawings: Versoja

 

                    Versoja 28.4.2016

Dropping Stairs

It's a funny thing when you are building your own stairs. The higher you build the stronger the foundation grows. But the first steps are so fragile, so fragile. So you build and build and the storm breaks and your stairs break and you drop down again and you build again and you drop down again and you build again and you drop down again and how much it hurts to drop once you've managed one or two or even three steps, almost there. Back on the hard floor again. Bruises multiplying on your skin.

So there must be a critical limit where the strength of the steps finally holds the weather and supports your own feet. Where you are reasonably safe and perhaps, when the wind inevitably blows or the tree falls down on your path, perhaps then you only break the very last step and perhaps not even that. Perhaps you remain standing high up, secure, ready to build higher, stronger.

It is a dream, that elusive limit. If it exists? Whether there is a danger zone just before? Where you are high enough for the critical fall, but not yet high enough for the critical strength? I don't think your chosen stair design factors into the probabilities. I don't think it matters where you build. This is a universal process.

Down here with the crooked nails and the splinters it is easy to understand those who've decided to just walk the bottom. But perhaps the process of building that first step over and over and over again makes your head stronger to be banged on the wall later. But please don't tell me the wall is actually real. Easier to imagine this boundless floor with infinite sky and limitless nails.

Drawings: Wind

 

                    Wind, Seashore, Akranes 6.4.2016

Missing

I miss the person I was. I miss the feel of my body working, obeying, strong, invincible.

I miss the seamless control over my physicality, the feeling of total symbiosis between my body and my mind, the feeling of being alive inside and out, breathing the heady power of being whole in yourself.

I miss the taste of sweat on my skin, the air in my lungs, the burn in my legs, the tired bliss in my eyes as I look in the mirror, drunk from movement, high on emotional creative energy, fuzzy soft dazed elevated from pushing over every possible limit.

I miss the heat on my cheeks, the blood rushing in my ears, the quiver in my muscles, the pain of pushing but not quite reaching yet, the frustration of aiming higher, the determination of never giving up, the exquisite strength of persistence. Once more, tighter, delicate, precise, with feeling, direction, higher, more, again, now think, alert, clever, bigger, stronger, more, again, now.

I fucking want that back. I want it all back.

It's not about goals, it's not about prizes, not about achieving, not about projects, missed time or opportunities. Who the fuck cares?

It's about feeling alive.

And I fucking want it back.

The Barrier

There is a barrier here, somewhere, just. Only I can't quite grasp it. Just in front of me, shimmering out of touch the moment I draw closer. I can see through it of course. I know things. I can even want things. Only nothing happens. I'm completely unable to lift one finger.

So I just sit here, watching the scenery roll by. Things happening. Knowing what I'd like to demand. Of myself. Watching things inevitably, agonizingly crumple down. Watching my strings snapping one by one by one. Here on my island, drifting slowly free, the strings broken one by one by one. Hoping to slowly shrug off the whole world from my shoulders, drift apart from all my impossible demands.

As what's the point of demands, anyway, surronded by the barrier. Outside or inside, this way or that, no matter, they cannot reach through either way. There is nothing I can do. Except tear apart. Except cave in. Watch things not happen. Feel things become harder, more twisted, complicated. Deny the truth.

Because where is the truth anyway? I cannot see the barrier. So is it there? Each day I fail to find it, it grows an inch taller. How long ago did it already reach above my head? Way above my reach. The only way not to suffocate is to simply turn my back on it and pretend it's all fine here inside. No strings, no barriers, no nothing.