There is a beach. In winter. Perhaps it is the beach that I live on, but the climate is different - snow streaks horizontally across the horizon. The murder of crows still scavenge everything that is washed up on the high tide, but they are big. They are very big - it is as though a class of schoolchildren dressed in crow costumes and are looking for crabs, sea anenomes and razor clams in the rock pools. But the rock pools are forests - full of bears and squirrels and horses stitched together from felt. And I lie here, in my little rotating room, and listen to the sea rush up and down the beach, twice a minute, sounding like the rush of blood to the head when I fell in love.
The house is small from the outside. Inside it is a labrynth - a tangle of rooms that shift and morph like an Escher print. But in colour. But that can be moved through. But are a model and not an image. And to move through the rooms of the house is not to move at all because it is the house itself that moves. I want to piss so the cogs I cannot see turn and bring the toilet to me. I want to fry an egg so a book is opened and a kitchen pops up from the page. I want to sleep, so the floor slides the bed under me and the arms in the walls undress me and tuck me in.
I go to work. The shop is huge but I am bigger. Everything is suffering from giantism, but I still cannot stand up straight behind the counter. I am dressed as a crow. Maybe I am a child and maybe the cappucino machine groupers and the innards of sea anenomes. None of this is certain - life may be a dream. But it is a dream made by animators - everything is made of paper and fimo. And it pulses, sways in time to the music that accompanies me wherever I go. I can do things with my feet. Anything is possible.
Where is the sky? Inches above everything that stands below it? Or is it a vast orb that moves further away from us the closer we get to it? Is it a metaphor for my friend in Hamburg or New York who I love so but can never reach? Have we had our minds altered so that we can no longer remember? I'm in Schilpol airport and on my way and he is in JFK. I'm at JFK and he is watching paper aeroplanes crashing in stop frame elegance into a cellophane Alster. Life is about beauty and longing. But none of it is real.
And a crowd has gathered outside. They want to share in the joy that is in this little model house. They want to see the love that I have here and now projected onto the windows. They know that I have to stay here and that I maybe will never leave. We will never leave. Or will we? The ending is never certain - it is not a cul de sac. It's the dual carriageway that runs past Route Du Rock - probably I (and everyone else who is a part of my story) will never have a clear idea about where it leads. But that view - the unknown line running to who knows where - is beautiful. And it is enough.
And still there is the beach. And the sun is coming out.
