The Tightening

Sitting here. The lights are bright.

The tightening. 

The pulsing behind the eyes slowly move to clench the right side of my jaw.

If i turn too abruptly, 

the tightening. 

Perhaps I hate bright lights because it is where I first lost a sense of humanity. Where doctors would investigate what went wrong. “What did go wrong?” i ask myself. 

Nothing

But the tightening reminds me to breathe. It reminds me of why I hate bright fluorescent lights. It is the first thing we see when we enter the world. It is the thing we see when we are being probed by strangers in white cloaks. It is often times where we search for food. It follows us. It follows me.

The tightening starts as I look up and see it glaring down on me while asking “what went wrong?”

Holding Hands, Time

The slowness of consequences are daunting. 

I do not get to go back and be in time. It is being ripped away.

There are moments of ease about it, as if everything is still fine. But it is far from fine. There are moments when I cannot breath at the thought of closure. Of an “after it ends.”

Time is passing. That passing comes regret. Regret comes mourning. 

This is where the melancholy lies. It engages with that passing. With the intangible.

According to Affect Theory, the intangible, the emotions, the feelings we experience are missed in language. They cannot be held even by the written word. 

So all of this musing about with words is quite trite. 

What does it mean to experience time resonating throughout my body like some frequency beyond my senses? I am sensing a moment unfelt. A moment intangible. 

I use technology to reach those moments. To touch. To hold. There is a lack, however. 

There is never a reach back.

Time does not recognize my desire to hold its hand. 

The Silence of Dying

Silence. 

The sound of danger. The sound I hear when it all goes black. 

Is there a sound for silence?

The negation of sound? 

Silence filled the house. It was thick. I was figuring out my steps as I embarked into a musty cloud of the unknown. This moment was my first encounter with the opaqueness of the unknown. I walked in and saw death glooming and hovering above. This is when the buzzing started for me. I left. I cried. I was in comatose. 

I stayed there for a long time. The comatose of opaque unknown. The known unknown. 

I realized then that everything was soft and malleable. We can manipulate ourselves into comfort. We can stay in comatose if we so choose. 

Now, I am choosing to look beyond the opaque because death did not survive that day.

The only thing that remains now is the silence. 

In It

Where to start? Should I have an intro? Should I do that artsy thing where you drop the reader during an existential crisis? How do you introduce yourself in a middle of a panic attack? 

How do you introduce a piece of work about panic, anxiety and melancholy to a viewer without alienating the viewer and/or the artist, which would be myself? 

The entire feeling of anxiety is isolation. At least with my mode of working, thinking and moving in the world I slowly work through my personal anxieties. They are rarely bursts. If i do suddenly meltdown, there is something big underlying the meltdown and the big thing rarely has to do with what is really the thing scratching through my organs. 

Where to start?

Do I talk about how death has permeated throughout my entire life?

Or that I grew up having nightmares about my parents dying?

Or do I talk about how I am coming to terms with the precariousness of life?

Most of the time, my panic attacks involve slow moving tunnel visions.

So here I am, in Costco. A warehouse. Full of people. All are focused on themselves. I am starting to move inward. I move inward to detach. To disassociate. To cope with the fact that we are all in a pandemic and have no idea what the hell we are even doing. Everyone is running around as if it is business as usual. Which who knows, maybe everyone else is also having a panic attack and are also disassociating. That would make sense since everyone around me is acting like it is fine, but in a way which something is not quite right. That something is unnameable. The thing in which we fear is unnameable while being aware of its existence. It surely exists. But where? It is invisible, we can’t see it. It isn’t the black bile that poisons us. It is not stark in a visual sense. It is hovering, however. Hovering and buzzing. Much like these fluorescent lights above us in the Costco. 

Uncanny? 

Dead-eyed?

Tunnel vision?

All i remember were the bright fluorescent lights and a guy yelling at me to move to a line that was to full in order for him to move past me. I was off planet earth, so i could not respond. 

I am hovering. I am buzzing. I leave.