MONUMENT

#19

Untitled

When I was five, or six, or seven, eight… I would explore patterns on the wallpaper at my grandma’s summer house. My stare would find a path through the labyrinth of ornaments, squeezing through the narrow spaces where ovals or diamonds would almost touch, yet leave room for my eyes to glide through before reentering a more open space with relief.

As the years have passed and the spatial grid around me has expanded thousands-fold, I find no more relief in this openness. On the contrary, I am anxious and disoriented, drifting through space, struggling to find comforting borders, much like a swimmer realizing that the pool lane has no end.

Oh, I miss the confinement of my childhood prison, the comforting wooden bars of my crib that I would bite into and taste the strong flavour of lacquer. Is this why dogs bite into furniture—maybe they just like the taste. Maybe we should get into it?

Now I’m realizing that the world doesn’t grow with us; it just expands, sparsifies. As we travel more, experience new things, we just accelerate this inevitable stretching of reality, leaving the gaps between meaningful objects and timestamps wider.

I am now back in my childhood home, lying on a colourful rug, pressing my face into firm and slightly dusty woolen geometry, eyeing the dents and imperfections of the shiny wooden parquet planks starting at the end of the Persian shore.

The whole world, the galaxy, could fit into my bedroom, and as a true young human I would explore it, tame it, cultivate it, build cities and destroy them, start wars, dance and idle. That dense core of my existence is now inevitably behind. In my human-scale big bang story, I am eons ahead on the timeline of dilution towards effervescence and weightlessness…

Almost weightless are the leaves falling from the trees at Eckhart Park, leaving space for my tired eyes to wander through the oscillating and incomprehensible maze of the tree crowns, following the prismatic blue path of the sky towards the mid-afternoon sun. As I finally reach it, the rays blind me, and my mind is calm.