I had an ex-girlfriend who’s grandmother had her apartment decorated exactly as it was in 1952. I’ve been thinking about this room in its perpetual state of being a lot these days. It reminds me of some memory experiment where some scientists (psychologists?) take people over 75 into a testing room to recount old memories. When the scientists decorate the room just as it would have been in the time that these memories occur, the participants not only remember more but also began to FEEL and ACT as if they are in that time.
If my head was a drag net, cast from the railing of a fishing boat, there would be equal parts fish, dolphins and Greenland sharks pulled to the surface: things desired, things of fancy, and things too old to even know where they belong but which are probably at the root of everything. Those Greenland sharks with the crystalline structures in their eyes telling the story of every good thing and every bad thing, both small and large; inland murders, but also ice curling around whirls in water from an oar stroke. Something gentle and kept as a secret.
But my head would drift around and settle like pennies falling through counter top games for donations to charities that are old like the faded plastic water wheels that no penny has ever landed on. Shells grabbed by an octopus and flipped for head or tales, but the action is like watching muddy water settle (when I think of muddy water settling I think of teeth that are white smiling through dirty windows) and all of the sudden it’s just my head and a bunch of octopi looking around waiting for something. Who knows what.
Someone bar the door made of grooves of kayaks pulled onto beaches that smell of low tide.
Someone plant driftwood like trees.
Someone make sure the guests have napkins.