Last night I dreamt of erotica, and then — a terrorist attack, as if I’d bought a ticket for a connecting flight with a layover, and suddenly the airport was being bombed.
I also think I’m a yo‑yo, constantly testing how far I can move from myself, only to find that the farther I run, the faster I snap back and crash at full speed into the same wall, catching myself the way a palm catches a ball.
If this were an audio performance,
this is where I’d insert the sound of a glass goblet shattering.
Sometimes I dream of men I’ve never seen. In the dream, I wake up and cannot remember who is lying next to me. I don’t see faces — only silhouettes and fragments of bodies. I pretend everything is normal while trying all the time to remember who it is. I never do. I wake up. I can’t fall asleep again.
Now for the part about despair. I’ve realized that most of what we do in life happens for one of two reasons: out of love or out of despair. The same gestures, started from different states, feel completely different and lead to completely different outcomes. Take traveling, for example. I travel a lot, almost always alone. To be honest, I mostly travel to escape the loneliness that presses on me every day — in other words, out of despair. To outrun thoughts of war, my own failures, my fears, the uncertainty of where I belong, the absence of a plan.
Maybe if I had a home, if I were happy, if I had a job that fulfilled me, a partner I never wanted to leave — not even for a night — and finally the chance to buy a beautiful lamp at a flea market without wondering, “How soon will I have to move again? Where to? How will I transport this lamp?” — maybe then I wouldn’t travel so recklessly, on my last money, anywhere at all, as long as it’s far, until the very last moment.
Sometimes we go on dates out of despair because we can’t let go of what came before. We overwork out of despair because working too much helps us forget, briefly, what hurts.
We read,
we eat,
we exercise,
we scroll,
we even sip our morning coffee — sometimes from that same place of despair,
because so much of what we expected from ourselves, from the world, from our life, doesn’t match reality.
And how do you force reality to match? From a place of love, it’s different. You can be in balance — in New Balance or in New York, it makes no difference — but you create from overflow, you travel with lightness and the desire to return soon. Then that delicious coffee, and having a favorite café in your city, stops being a substitute for meaning or a reason not to hang yourself. Then you stop being a substitute for your own truths.
And then I take that coffee from that beautiful café and walk to the studio. Entering art is always safe, from anywhere, no matter how bruised or kissed you are. It’s a certainty: repeat certain gestures, enter a certain state, and magic inevitably begins. Everything else fades. The wounds start to heal. You stop replaying strange dreams about terrorist attacks and unfamiliar men. The yo‑yo returns to the palm.
In a documentary about Samuel Beckett yesterday, a male voice said, “Samuel began to write because of the pain.” And yesterday, I began to write because I thought I was a yo‑yo ball.
If this were an audio performance, I’d now turn on the sound of an ocean storm
and let it collapse over the audience,
wave
after wave,
for another thirty to forty seconds.