Since Stage Rabbit is about reflection. Here’s a really personal one from one of us.
*
I write to you from November 2019. You can imagine it to be one of those days we’ve often had: we wake up early with some vivid dream haunting us and while we sip on some newly found flavour of tea or coffee we surf the net to understand, rather timidly, what the dream meant. Our eyes would widen with the truth in it. But the truth very often affirmed our action rather than made us feel the guilt we should have. We read a bit more, but not too much because we see those eyes looking at us. The eyes that make us wonder, how much of the internet is true. Should our mood be affected by something barely even?
Imagine the day to be 0'C at 7 in the morning and the radiator overheating. The warmth hugging our bare skin as a certain emptiness stays. We wonder always, every time this occurs, do we like the emptiness or should we be worried? Should it concern us that it’s a recurring feeling and insecurity? Or that its what helps us wake up every morning knowing that nothing can really harm an empty space. It’s only the realisation of the void where voices are just an echo and you come to be on the other side of that window.
It's at this hour usually that we would have the out-of-body experiences, of situations, lived and those places we stare at. From our handwritings to the choice of post-its on the wall. From the aesthetics of our rooms to the music playing in the background (James Holden at the moment), all of it seems designed by somebody else at times. Chosen by someone else. Liked by someone else. We wonder if its because we don’t stay long enough with the aftermath of an experience, whether we let go and move onto something else too soon. Is that how we get ahead in life? By not really paying attention to what comes after the pause?
But what comes after the pause? I am assuming its an overwhelming sense of existing. What do you think it is? I remember having lived it, and I remember you lived it too, although your memory of it must be further away than mine. After all, it’s hardly been a decade for me, you’re a bit older. The after moment reminds me of fear, of lingering too long over a moment already lived and making it seem that it constituted more matter than it did, even at the moment. It seems like I could disrupt what it was by hovering too long. Is that why we liked distance? Is that why we worked better with it.
*
It is one of those days. When the phone buzzing would finally not magnetically pull us towards it. It used to happen more often when I was in school. I would watch as you recollect those memories of the late nights when sleep would dissuade us. You would gather the black gel pens and the blue, they were always blue, diaries from under your clothes and start scribbling. I remember staying up late into the night till I heard the first cookers go off. The heartbeat of the fan would suddenly have its band around 7 which would inevitably drown the fan itself. And we would have drained ourselves, writing about ourselves, of people who had stayed in our thoughts, of self-pity and vanity, we would constantly look at ourselves from the outside and I wondered why we did that. Why we imagined a version of us looking at us from the windows. For a long time, and I remember we had a societal realisation of it before we consciously redesigned the personality and features, but for a long time, we were men who looked at us. Men who we loved and who said they loved us, but men nonetheless. Over time I remember we negotiated the face to become a woman and then it was usually a faceless gaze, but a gaze that stayed with us, in a way made us who we are too. Ma never knew, neither did anybody else. But I speak of Ma because, do you remember, she always, always knew it all?
*
It is one of those days when the notifications were a combination of news and messages from him and her and her and them, and then again, and not just some boy who you liked or some girl who wanted to share a story with me. He is still with me. I wished this was materially true, but we always chose partners who could allow us to feel like a maverick, unfettered by the physical closeness and yet fused in the in-betweenness of not knowing where and not knowing when. They didn’t have to do much, and if they did it was a bonus. But it was usually the kind where there could be a distance in between. Why we liked the distance, why we enjoyed it even was beyond us really. He is back home, I am here. Do you remember how that felt? I want you to tell me what happens and yet I want to learn how to place my feet on this ground I don’t recognise. And while I am here I wanted to remind you of what we felt. It wasn’t remorse, it wasn’t even sadness. You wonder even now I’m guessing, whether that one decision of shutting the moment after the pause when we were all of 18, stuck forever. Did the door close? It was beginning to feel more like a window though, I could see it, I could watch it. Like the fact that we would imagine at the window, but I wasn’t able to live it. It seemed like a silent movie, in colour and somehow the people we saw inside we didn’t entirely recognise. Did we speak that way? Feel that way? I couldn’t recognise it. And so the distance seems doable and at the same time not alive. For all the academic talk of interface realities, I wanted to ask them about this, do interfaces make the distance easier or invisible. Do they create a reality we don’t have any bodily connection to? I wonder if you ever did. Can you let me know? I’d like some directions.
*
It is one of those days. The tears are here again too. But you weren’t sad that day, were you? It was just the same feeling of swimming in the emptiness. But maybe it’s never empty. Maybe it’s never the moment after the pause. Maybe I just had lost my navigator and unfamiliarity felt empty. But we recognised the leaves moving outside our window, golden with the street lights, waiting for daylight to break. It was so deceiving, did you ever feel that? Are you still feeling the deceit? Or have you changed yet? It seemed like we spent a lot of time with ourselves, except when she came into our lives. Have you ever felt that again?. The quiet of those times had been filled for too long with music and suddenly I missed the fan in my room.
Do you know I can’t remember her voice? Not even a hint of it. I remember him and him and her even, even though I’d rather not. But her, I can’t remember her. It’s not distant, it’s not an echo, it’s not a whisper, it’s just not there. I know you still wonder about that, I remember you worrying about it for a long time. You wondered if it was trauma. But we dealt with that, this wasn’t a traumatic blind spot. I don’t know what it is though. It’s a strange landscape I am still building, modulated the tone and pitch in my head when I try to recollect her talking to me. Especially, nowadays, when I want to tell her about him.
*
It is one of those days. Tomorrow we begin again, another block, another 2 months. It went by so quickly and I just about but not yet, feel like I could see myself here. How long did it take you? Did you stay? Did you go back to the home we had had for 25 years? I wonder what I’ll do. I wonder if a new home is in the making or am I forcing it. If you did go back, how is it? Does it feel familiar? Can you recognise yourself there, as a part of the air? I can’t imagine it yet, but maybe its too soon for me. Do you see him? Is she around you? And how is the political situation now? Are you still fighting because that’s the only option? I remember there was no option when I lived there. We fought because not fighting was never an option. I remember when I came here, it felt strange because of it. The fight was a choice. There were days I could pick. I remember you got calmer. Was it because we had the choice to be?
*
It’s laundry day. Remember needing clothes for the next block, it’s that day. There are so many things I want to know, but you know us, we don’t know where to begin.
11th November, 2019
6:00AM | Utrecht, Netherlands
