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.
From Helvetica to Arial then back to Helvetica. To sleep. From bed on your feet then back to Arial. Makes more sense. Select text. Underline. Undo. Italics? Bold. Italic. Undo italic. Now just looks bold. Undo bold. Only italic. Now looks important. Undo italic. Regular Arial. Good. But From Ariel to Arial narrow now. Now italic. Looks too italic. Arial Narrow italic. Font size up, too narrow. Okay stop. Now looks italic and wide. Italic enough and wide enough Arial Narrow in italic, for the title. But Body. Body in serif. Font size down. body body body. From Helvetica to Times New Roman. Now too small. Doesn’t make sense. Font size up. Stop. Doesn’t make sense. No, back to Arial. From bed on your feet then back to Arial.
To write is to show appreciation for the knowledge that just came to you.
Today, I was about to fall from the sidewalk as I was looking at my reflection on a car. Every time you called my name I said yes and heard nothing back. Yet at a distance we’re bouncing in the same timezone.
Maybe I’ll stop saying maybe for the things I want for them to happen. No one can be a replacement for anyone. These crazy dreams continue. I’m thinking if I should write more than twenty minutes each day. Though I have to finish a fictional dialogue between a mother and a daughter. Maybe I’ll make sure to write, to sleep well, to wipe my face and show some love to mom and dad. Something will happen.
I guess this exercise works like when I used to play volleyball. They told me I turned out to be quite short though. Shorter than they would expect. And I stopped measuring myself. Now I can’t find a couch I like.
It seems to me I have to take this writing thing more seriously. But it feels like a drawer stuck in its place no matter how hard I push. You PULL a drawer to open it you IDIOT. Stop pushing.
In the five seconds of coming after I masturbate I remember I should start having sex again. But this thought lasts quite short, shorter than I would expect, and I forget about it already as I’m putting the dildo back in its pouch. I use a cotton one with drawstrings.
I’m going away for a while. We’re going to vote at some point. We’re going to fuck at some point. We who? Both the liberals and the conservatives. I’m going to read a text at some point. What text is what I’m trying to figure out. This pen is going to stop writing at some point soon. Not because the twenty minute timer would go off but that the ink will. And I will continue writing nothing on a paper. I will write with an empty pen and make shapes of letters, like a relief. We’ll have a relief soon. Soon when? I’ll see you. Very soon. God I hate this sentence.
I am getting better at finding the light switch in the dark. my fingers have this little dance searching for the button. It’s the motor coordination that alerts you of things you thought you could do. I relate differently to all these poets now. I used to want to be like one of them. Now I just want to be like myself. Your left hand alone doesn’t manage to open a bottle this morning and you freak out. Left becomes right and right becomes left and you think whether it is all because you missed your turn.
You look through the space between two people, you ask, would I fit in there, can I smoothly glide my way in between the two, and they think I am a feather, or a bug the worst case. A bug that makes a buzzing sound only for the duration of the encounter, the collision, or a bug in the system, their system, our system. We who?
How dare you walk in between the two? How dare you come to be more smart than us?
I was looking at the bird (Remember the bird?) thinking it’s not where it’s supposed to be. The ground is too low for wing motion and the sky too unreachable, paralyzing, falsifying. So instead I decide to write B-I-R-D on an open-air wall on the third story of a three-story building, thinking it might make the bird happy. So now on the same street I have the A and I have the B, doing rounds of back and forth with a full truck, thinking if I move enough it will reveal something to me when I hit the bed at night. On the same street I have a wall that says BIRD quite up high, and next to that building on a door, someone wrote “stones may fall”.
Aleksandra texts me saying that she thinks Sisyphus and Orpheus are the same person. Hearing this, she says, I think they were never really separate. I tell her I feel no coherence or real premise to this story I’ve been telling. But if you love it, then I love it too, and I miss loving something only because you do.
Not writing is not an option.
Not loving is not an option.
Coming out the tunnel they told me you would follow. I walked and walked despite my pants and despite my doubt and sorrow. Somewhere close to the exit I lost it all, I turned my head back and glanced, sirens have started. You apparently had returned to where you came from and since then, I never knew anyone who knew you, or who could name you, or could draw out your face. I know where you had returned to, but I realize I never got a chance to visit it. Otherwise I would have asked, to anyone, for my life, did you see what happened? What was it all about?
I would do it all over again. I would look back again risking for an answer.
I put two singular papers in my bag today separately. A shampoo brochure my dermatologist gave me with the shower gel she wants me to use circled with a blue pen, and a pamphlet for a theatre play I went to see in the evening. Living with your parents feels like walking on sandpaper. Or rubbing your crotch against one. In any case I can’t walk a straight line down our new corridor. I talk from the back of my shoulder. I want to stab someone with the fork I’m holding at the dinner table. But what about fasting? What about a fast-pace melting? What about this thing I told you to maybe help me? So I imagine no room but long long curtains. I imagine long silences. Big crowds in front of burials. And in the middle of it all, someone holding the scissors. I planned a paper to wrap around your hands, split my fingers in halves and waited for you to hit. For you to tell me this is it.
But first make a mess before putting it in a place is not how I wanted anything to be but the truth is I have to understand. I have to understand that I am me.
And then when I leave it’s because I can.