Flights

ABANDONED APARTMENT

The apartment doesn’t understand what’s happened. The apartment thinks its owner has died. Ever since the door slammed shut, since the key grated around in the lock, all sounds are muffled, their shades and edges absent, as in indistinct stains. Space condenses, unused, undisturbed by any draft, any ruffling of the curtains, and in this motionlessness, trial forms tentatively begin to crystallize, forms suspended for a moment between the floor and ceiling of the entryway.

Of course no new thing comes into being now – how could it? These are only imitations of familiar shapes, melding into bubbly, blistery clumps, maintaining their outlines just for a second. These are individual episodes, isolated gestures, like a footprint on a soft carpet made endlessly and always in the same exact spot and then vanishes. Or a hand over a table, going through the motions of writing, although the motions are incomprehensible because they occur without a pen, without paper, without writing, without even the rest of the body.