under the table yesterday at a video exhibition i remembered that i feel safe hiding under tables before books and films and art, my first refuge was under our dining room table in the dark it feels wrong to call it a dining table-- we never dined there, actually my famiy never really dined. we didn't have scheduled food or assigned seating or matching cutlery. the table more or less stood abandoned in this sparsely decorated room that we only entered for special occasions (any social function where we had to put on our happy family faces) maybe that's why i liked it, because that room never really felt like home--the comfy all encompassing mess that was evidence of our true unaffected lives never managed to creep in there it was strange and familiar hiding under the table at the gallery-- it was like walking down a road you walk down everyday but suddenly smelling a city you visited as a kid it wasn't exactly nostalgia a lot of people say innocence is just a glorified form of ignorance, and i can understand that but that's not what i miss, i don't feel a sense of loss and i don't regret at all knowing what i know now i guess i just hm i... admire! i admire the power of these carefully crafted memories that surprise me every now and then in many ways i could say my life is much more remarkable now than it was then, but it doesn't feel that way, i'm not taking any of it in i could sit under that dining table for hours as a kid and purely by virtue of my imagination, feel unprompted waves of ecstacy or grief wash over me with an intensity that i rarely feel now my friend noha says i shouldn't expect the world to slow down for me, but the thing is, it did once before--in the middle of a war and then a marital war and always in the middle of nowhere. i lived in an isolation so absolute i can't imagine living through it now she said adapt to survive and i gave some sort of glib opinionless question of an answer like 'but how much of yourself are you willing to compromise?" when i know that it's nothing. i don't want to compromise anything. not one toe nail, cell, centriole, absolutely positively nothing. for my dad's peace of mind i won't walk around in flowy silk pants smoking a cigarette with a long black filter, but for the world? forget about it. not a big fan at the moment. |