blind floor-plan

2020

blind floor-plan

or: she asks me to draw her my home, and i tell her i don’t know, not just yet.
based on Abraham Cruzvillegas: Blind Self Portrait… (2017)

#E1EBEE
picture this: 
so he tells her the sky swallows him every night.
she hears this, and she doesn’t believe it, but he’s six so she builds him 
a roof anyway: driftwood from the seaside. jagged pieces of metal, mud over everything.
he goes to bed. 
the next morning he tells her that the wind keeps drowning him, because
it wants something that he owes, and he 
can’t
give it back. he says the house
will go out like candles, so could 
she please just do something about it? and at this point she’s
sick of it, but she’d die for him, (almost did), so she
builds him four walls underneath the roof: the same hunt. still moulding things together in ways they shouldn’t. it holds steady against the rain and the wind and the fog, and he thinks
there’s something in that: that there’s
something in making and being made, the
assembly. 

#5F9EA0
“give me a home” so you do. so you go on, and among the city
where you can’t smell the sea, and metal comes in unscathed, 
you make a home for them in  
the circle of serenity on the dining room table. 
in the exhale between sun set and rise. 
in the mull of the aquarium. in the washing machine, 
in curve of the moon sunken in river, 
in the smudge of tiffany pastel, chalk on the sidewalk, 
on your walls, on your hands. so you built them
roofs without knowing you did. 

#E1EBEE
set the scene: 
it’s dinnertime, and they are far 
far away from the houses that flicker like candles, 
that bloom and dim as the seasons 
blinked by. now the walls are made of
concrete, and the roof doesn’t slope upwards, it’s 
flat just like the rest of everything. and she’s dying
to know home again. dying to know if the one she made for him
was enough. so she asks him-

#5F9EA0
you’re filling in the address at the post office 
(because you just moved, and you’re wearing overalls and there are paint
stains on your car, boxes that you have to unload, and you just wanted to do this one
thing first–
and the label next to the dotted line says 
HOME so you begin to write, you
count the parts of your address off on your fingers, 
so there’s the city. the district. the street
floor number. apartment number. but that 
doesn’t feel right, so you keep on going. 
chalk on the sidewalk, on the walls, on your hands.
your homes spilling from finger to 
finger, hand to hand, homes you made
and gave to the world, and homes that were made and given
to you, and you’re counting off your toes, remembering 
the last time you felt safe. and the second last, 
all the way back to the roof and the walls your 
mother built for you with driftwood and metal teeth 
but you never saw again, in the house that flickered 
like candles. in the middle of the post office, 
the woman at the counter staring at you
with something like pity. like she’s seen the roof and still
remembers it too.

Olivia (Class of 2022) is currently a Film Student, having been part of the second cohort of Literary Arts students (2017-2020). Ever since she learnt how to write prose poetry, she can’t go back to writing just prose or just poetry. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.