grind-the-rust

I have only slept sporadically these past few weeks. In the night, I get up and begin to dust, scrub floors, wash every mirror in the house. I drink beer and tea, I read, and read, and read, switching my keyboard’s language back and forth, searching out voices. Rub at raw eyes, realise it’s time to get up for work soon, curl up on the couch so I don’t miss the alarm. I rock my angry grief to sleep, wrap it in hope that gentleness and patience wins out in me for another day, that I can listen and speak calmly and - what’s that phrase therapists like? – “hold space”. The working weeks grow long and fuzzy at the edges. The world and I withdraw from one another. I avert my red basilisk gaze as my Anglo-Australian colleagues avert theirs. Only fellow foreigners still meet my eye, in warehouse and studio alike. Saturday afternoon. I walk through the city after work, and the bright flags blossom in a dispersing crowd, snapping their sweet blues and yellows in the cool late-summer breeze.

At home, I sit down to sculpt, but I keep falling in love with my armatures and have trouble covering them with clay. Does anyone else get this, where the first gestural lines are so pure, you fear to go beyond them? I like beginnings and endings, but oh god the middle part of everything is difficult. It takes slowness and more trust in one's hands and the world than I usually have. Someone I've worked for for ages took me under his wing this year after I showed him a few maquettes, decided to teach me more formally. I've been going to the studio weekly on the quiet, making studies. I'll be helping others do the same next year. I quit my e

The busy season of editing is finally over. It ended quite abruptly in fact, so much so, that I've found myself suddenly empty of pocket and rich in time. It took me a while to realise this fact, that I wasn't frantic anymore, as my eyes were still habitually gritty and sleepless for weeks, and my head continued to hum and rattle and resound with stampedes of other peoples' words about water-efficient urban planning, new applications for Bayesian reasoning under uncertainty, blood cancers, and whatever else got offered up for funding and passed through my hands, which tapped clarity and rhetorical flourish into it over hours of keyboard stacc