The Blossom of a Trace

I’m going to market for the first time this season tomorrow. I like going to market. I’m reminded of all of the stuff I’ve created. I like that a relationship I can have with the stuff I’ve created is forgetfulness. I like that the things I’ve created are something that can be forgotten.

The stuff I’ve created has a shelf in my office. There are books and greeting cards that live on small wooden shelves that sit on small wooden pegs that were stained and painted and sanded to look like aged blue. Each edge of worn-out paint looks like a shoreline, unveiling the kind of brown that lives in duned beaches and salty water.

There are drawings of plants I love sitting in picture frames under a stairwell. Their frames are different shapes and colors, and they’re always crooked because they are nudged by each footstep going up and going down. There are currently no footsteps communing with my stairwell. Instead, they are communing with bedroom floors and bathwater.

I like making stuff and things that sit on shelves and in picture frames. And I’d like to believe the stuff likes being made. The stuff is happening right now, between curious words and thick spaces. Ethnography encourages thick description, but I don’t think it is the description that is thick, but the stuff it describes. The stuff is sitting in rivers that are legible; describable; textural; sometimes moving like molasses that we fight as it begins to pull us back with them; sometimes moving like sunlight reaching my eyes; sometimes moving like a raindrop headed toward somewhere to land.

To land (v): to be as land is, to do as land does.

My arms are landing, covered in a rash from someone green, the blossom of a trace.