(no subject)
I have been too exhausted to write about the dismantling.
I feel like I'm in mourning, still now more than a week later.
My home is gone, my child is gone, my self-completion is gone.
We ripped it apart in three days. Kerry and I and a rotating cast of circus folks.
I cried before we began, sobbed in the altars room. Kerry and Alison held me. I waited until they left to actually begin dismantling. I sang to the room as I first ripped down the paper bags, I kept singing and working, I was shaky and alone.
It came apart so quickly, surfaces peeled off of infrastructure, a skeleton within a day. More and more things poured out of it, I re-understood the meaning of saving EVERYTHING as more and more stuff just APPEARED, stuff that the audience couldn't see, stuff tucked under stuff tucked under stuff. Seven months poured in to the room, sorted and packed up hastily in to boxes, to my porch, to the recycling center, to friends, to the trash.
I cried when I heaved the first bag of garbage in to the dumpster. A year's worth of styrofoam and #2-6 plastics. A year of labor over waste, and now this moment of giving in to powerlessness, this moment of acknowledging vices as what they are.
One night weeks ago we sat across from each other on the bridge as I stapled phonebook pages to it, we talked and I stapled and when I looked up my project was beautiful, and it scared me. Beauty is optimism, but where does optimism come from? Rationally, I feel nothing but scared, but he was sitting across from me and I was not scared.
When it came time to take down the bridge, I unscrewed furiously, but it would not undo. Too many supports, too many screws, too much worry that it would be strong enough to hold all that weight. I stood back gaping while he hit it with a sledgehammer. I want there to be more concrete symbolism here: I built that bridge and I needed him to help me take it down.
After that first hour of take-down, I was never alone. When the volunteers left he stayed. We unscrewed and unpacked and hauled and loaded and drove and unloaded and drove back again until everything lay on the field ready for the circus besides a giant pile of newspaper. We were both raw and exhausted. We both cried. We filled his car with my boxes, we drove home, we wrapped our arms around each other, we droveback again in the morning and we worked again. I can't remember ever leaning so hard against another person, I don't know how I could have done this undoing without him.
This is such a privileged sadness, and I am even more supported in it than I need to be. Today is the first day I have not cried in a week. I miss that room, I miss those six rooms, I felt completed there but they will never exist again.
Well, onwards. I am still so tired, can't quite get in to the circus like I wish I was, but chugging away, working hard, working as much as I can. I think it will come together beautifully, because it has to. My house is slowly healing itself, my last paper will get edited and turned in tonight, I will graduate and process wool for the summer. I will go to iceland with my family and come back. The fall will exist and I will do something then, I have only vague ideas what it will be. The future will happen. There is no way it could feel more shocking and blurry and surreal as right now.
I feel like I'm in mourning, still now more than a week later.
My home is gone, my child is gone, my self-completion is gone.
We ripped it apart in three days. Kerry and I and a rotating cast of circus folks.
I cried before we began, sobbed in the altars room. Kerry and Alison held me. I waited until they left to actually begin dismantling. I sang to the room as I first ripped down the paper bags, I kept singing and working, I was shaky and alone.
It came apart so quickly, surfaces peeled off of infrastructure, a skeleton within a day. More and more things poured out of it, I re-understood the meaning of saving EVERYTHING as more and more stuff just APPEARED, stuff that the audience couldn't see, stuff tucked under stuff tucked under stuff. Seven months poured in to the room, sorted and packed up hastily in to boxes, to my porch, to the recycling center, to friends, to the trash.
I cried when I heaved the first bag of garbage in to the dumpster. A year's worth of styrofoam and #2-6 plastics. A year of labor over waste, and now this moment of giving in to powerlessness, this moment of acknowledging vices as what they are.
One night weeks ago we sat across from each other on the bridge as I stapled phonebook pages to it, we talked and I stapled and when I looked up my project was beautiful, and it scared me. Beauty is optimism, but where does optimism come from? Rationally, I feel nothing but scared, but he was sitting across from me and I was not scared.
When it came time to take down the bridge, I unscrewed furiously, but it would not undo. Too many supports, too many screws, too much worry that it would be strong enough to hold all that weight. I stood back gaping while he hit it with a sledgehammer. I want there to be more concrete symbolism here: I built that bridge and I needed him to help me take it down.
After that first hour of take-down, I was never alone. When the volunteers left he stayed. We unscrewed and unpacked and hauled and loaded and drove and unloaded and drove back again until everything lay on the field ready for the circus besides a giant pile of newspaper. We were both raw and exhausted. We both cried. We filled his car with my boxes, we drove home, we wrapped our arms around each other, we droveback again in the morning and we worked again. I can't remember ever leaning so hard against another person, I don't know how I could have done this undoing without him.
This is such a privileged sadness, and I am even more supported in it than I need to be. Today is the first day I have not cried in a week. I miss that room, I miss those six rooms, I felt completed there but they will never exist again.
Well, onwards. I am still so tired, can't quite get in to the circus like I wish I was, but chugging away, working hard, working as much as I can. I think it will come together beautifully, because it has to. My house is slowly healing itself, my last paper will get edited and turned in tonight, I will graduate and process wool for the summer. I will go to iceland with my family and come back. The fall will exist and I will do something then, I have only vague ideas what it will be. The future will happen. There is no way it could feel more shocking and blurry and surreal as right now.