convergences

reflections

kissing yourself in a mirror

folding in on yourself like a Rorschach test, every moment a silly little symmetry of your past and future, deep time loops, ribbon diagrams

In 2018 I started writing a story set in summer 2020. In the story, I was going to Burning Man to quest for magic water. In the story there was a jubilee movement, towards erasing debts and hoards and starting fresh; in the story were all my dearest friends and favorite memories, weaving in a sort of autofanfiction, all my wishes and ultimate outfits. Also in the story were cartoonishly oversized threats, and villains lurking just out of frame, manageable and defanged, and undertones of distance and longing, yearnings moving in many vectors.

By the time real summer 2020 came around, yearning, longing & distance were deeply real, and I had printed out the third version of my story, fashioned bespoke wearable covers, custom copies lit through with gifts from recipients of the second and first versions (artists and friends I respect and admire). I hung all 21 copies up on the side of my kid’s playhouse with pushpins, sat with them in the golden August evening breeze, and did a livestream on my MacBook via streamyard (RIP google hangout on air).

I plucked each copy off the wall, closed my eyes and by chance chose a page, chose a passage, spoke it aloud into the summer 2020 air, and felt the words and their (alternate) realities bouncing around me and through me. I read them to share them with my imaginary audience, to speak their wishes into the ether, fix them into accessible pixels and wavelengths, and to fold my fake dreamy summer 2020 into our real hard one. Fake is a subgenre of real, one passage read.

Towards the end of my reading my kid called to me from the backyard to show me a beautiful thing, and I went to her—a trademark interruption of our times, where our responsibilities/realities blend together/overlap each other.

I hope this performance is a relic of my hopes and my dreams for jubilee and soft revolution and contributes to a world where such change is becoming evermore possible & imminent—a better world is lurking gently and darkly all around us, just waiting for us to call it forth and make it so (say the magic words, do the magic actions).