stones may fall is the performance text written for and performed during the group exhibition "Tip of the Tongue" in Garage Gallery, Prague in May 2023.
Moving is a serious matter. The preliminary stage of a cardboard box is a two-sided view, yet you know your larger way around it without a manual. The flat surface speaks of six entirely different but connected dimensions. You think of your house in smaller units, and this porcelain bird you liked and bought, it undergoes short term memory loss when packed up under layers of bubblewrap, getting from A to B in a truck. It already forgot about flying.
When you think of the human body, when small spaces are made for us, we fit in and adopt not minding as strategy right away. When a room feels smaller when fully empty, I recommend you fill and organize it in such a way that you have smaller spaces within the larger space to feel nevertheless large in it. Reject the illusion.
To tell your real size: Measure your pants; the gap left between chair and wall for you to pass. Measure how far your middle finger extends, or the pinky. Measure the empty field under the trees, the size of your mother’s fist. Count how many mosquitoes you attract on a summer night. The diameter of your open mouth.Or the wood per meter pricing for your coffin. The size of the jar holding your ashes. Count the months passed since the break-up. Measure in square meters your favorite corner you keep to yourself in your heart.
Destination is a serious matter. It no longer works well to form metaphors when writing. A pretends to be B and B pretends to be A. You turn the cardboard box upside down and it looks not exactly but almost the same as the previous view. You realize you had to memorize which side to cut it back open to find exactly what you had expected to find. You realize you should have arranged your own boxes yourself. You realize you’ve been fooled. You realize no one was going tell you which side to sleep on. You have a back pain now.
Your movements get slower navigating through the new place. The light switch isn’t there anymore but here. The button isn’t as wide anymore, but smaller and narrow. The mirror in the bathroom is bigger, so you see more of yourself in a single glance. The doors don’t lock from the outside but from the inside. The floor doesn’t make a cracking sound when entering the kitchen but right here, in the corner connecting your room and the hall. The windows open up from the top, and now, your bed faces a parking lot. There are somehow more cables, and also shoes are allowed indoors in this new place. This time the drawers are larger, all the cutlery and the equipment they do fit and there’s even space remaining. You have dimmed the lights on purpose and have kept the writing desk that bent in the middle over the years, with your elbows, making the objects on it roll to the center when placed.
Saying goodbye to a wall is a serious matter. You try to let it out but don’t know where to place yourself in doing, snug in the corner and after all, crying whose name? You refuse to hug yourself. You try to convince yourself that you’ll be back but the movers don’t believe you. They throw tape at you, “hey come put this together!”. Everyone’s in denial, and only the windows know how much they had to be left open so you could breathe at night. You realize you needed more witnesses. And you start unpacking the bird.
Everything is technically your one and only chance at it. But chances are you’ll have many more of everything. Like words. Fuck it up and you’re good to go.
You think of what you used to be. You confuse a thought and a rock. You look at an object no longer standing where it’s supposed to stand, and you think of your ex.
Okay, I’m going to talk about something I haven’t talked about before.
Isn’t that what we always do?
No, I learned to repeat myself at a very young age. Now I’m paying for tattoo removals.
Wait, that’s against the whole point.
Isn’t that what we always do?
If you’re speaking, in general, at large, if you have picked a life of speech, you inevitably have to repeat certain words. But no silence can be repeated a second time. There is no way to record it, to keep track of it, no way to hold someone accountable by what they did not say, no way to play it back, to rewind, to re-listen. No way to ask them “Wait, come again?”
All is connected. This time, when you speak, the movers do believe you, or they just believe your story. They teach you how to hug a wall, how to use your arms when lifting boxes, how to run a truck, how stay more silent. And you free the bird.
Distance is a serious matter. It no longer breaks people apart but puts them back together, like double-sided tape, like a good poem of two lines, or two pages, like a 21 minute song, like the wooden bridge in the forest, like the love that never came, like the child who never died, like a door with a stopper stuck under it, like the superglue drying on the side of your finger after fixing the handles, like a “conversation” with your mom that lasts 24 years, or like a train ride that never ends, but it does and when it does end, what do you realize? That distance was only a thing over the phone.
You start writing about the bird. Or you come back to the same paragraph over and over again to feel proud when you come home. You read it again and again to remember who you are. You remember you could write. You remember you didn’t have to, but still did. You remember who they were, the people. You remember all the days leading up to your first birthday, you remember your first encounters with this world, how no one believed where you came from, how no one warned you about any of this, you remember how you hate these reminders, how you just wanted to be born and understand all of it by yourself, and have the chance to forget if you wanted. You read it. and read it. and read it. over. and over. again