I watched them disappear on the roof and wondered if I would ever get to the top to show myself to the sun, as if I wanted to ask - can you see me now? Are we alike? Even as I walk away, the space haunts me I wanted to join them, but my small hands could not support the weight of my body. They grabbed the concrete fragments with all their might and piled up. An ontological discussion formed on the wall, commented on live - who is a dog and who is a Jew? Walking past the transformer and seeing the inscription calling out to someone in the neighborhood void, I recall how older boys climbed over the protruding parts of the building to its slightly sloping roof. Deleted words, altered words, distorted echoes as someone's hands, armed with spray, tried to change the meaning of what they found in an interpretive act extract from the mangled letters something they had not seen before. I remember the flag with red and white stripes and the scribbled insults when the other side discovered the new painting. Back then, the writing on its wall expressed affiliation with one of two rival sports clubs. I think back to when, as a child, I sat on the small wall surrounding the transformer. Maybe the people addressed by the small concrete building, buzzing with electricity, used to meet by its side, looking together into the unshielded sun that burns every bit of the neighborhood's concrete body, made up of overlapping accretions, from which emerge caricatured limbs, random faces of buildings - glimpses of smiling cracks in old facades. I look around, looking for someone whose absence I can feel whose absence is so strongly imprinted in the space that the buildings themselves have begun to call out to them, longing for them to return. I wonder who could have written it - and why. The question is crowned with a smiling face: ":D". Someone has drawn a big blue penis on it (circumcised they always draw them circumcised, although hardly anyone in Poland practices this custom). I pass a power transformer located at the end of the parking lot next to my block. It looks for the seeds of self-destruction in everyday movements, in the friction of bodies against bodies, in the rustling of feet on concrete as I walk out of my neighborhood, feeling the world open up in front of me - just a little, just enough for me to feel that I can choose to walk in it. Is the sun watching us, too? Is its gaze burning, searching among the small creatures scurrying across the flat concrete surfaces for something it could call mutual? Perhaps it is looking for a likeness to itself the embers flowing from cyclical self-immolation. The smell has become almost synonymous with a journey to nowhere, with strange faces whose features seem to blur when they are at the periphery of my vision - when I watch them through the window as blurry reflections, having no idea that I am poking my gaze into their bodies, piercing their flesh like solar heat. This is what I associate summer bus trips with. It draws energy directly from the sky, from the incessant summer heat, while the creatures it carries on its surface pray for rain - pray for it to wash them off the surface of the earth to take away the heat that penetrates their skin, seeps into their muscles and bones, making their bodies slowly boil, dripping with the sweat that constantly pours from them, which, steaming, fills closed spaces with its sour smell. It grows like a sprawl that can't stop expanding. Its body covers almost every nook and cranny, stretching within a small horizon bounded by buildings. Light penetrates it, filling it and feeding it with heat like a monstrous child stretched across the visible world. The heated concrete greedily absorbs the tremor of the steps placed on it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |