Bridge 1

I am coiled, around myself. Always surrounded by myself. It can be suffocating. My fibres nano-hard, angular, scratching, rubbing; my whole flexible, pliant, they even call me 'soft'. Slid between others like me, I can feel myself crawled along spines, so long that I forget where I end and begin. I am pushed against bones, books, pulled into knots, veiled, staring up through skirts, or your pant leg. I recoil.

I am makeshift, provisional, impermanent. A conglomerate of things that would never come into contact, except to form this temporary structure in space. Parts of me have seen the sharp edge of a blade, the bristles of a paintbrush, the inside of a dog’s mouth. Now the oily pads of fingers, walking, tickling, marking space and time. I hold fast but am tethered to my own precarity. I am bridge as obstacle, not thoroughfare. I am a reminder –

That the easiest way is not always the best.

That there are always unseen things to be crossed over or connected.

That climbing up and then down again is one way to gain perspective.

I'd like to try turning an idea into something using my hands, but 2 hands are needed and that leaves... no hands to film it.

I am at home, as we have all been over these past months, but it feels rare and special to be alone now, in a way that I never appreciated. And hard to be alone in a way that I so often ignored.

I try to nestle my phone in the hollow between my chin and clavicle. It keeps sliding. You watch it slip; you watch me slip. I keep catching it. Maybe this isn't going to work. And then, just like that, it holds.

My hands move quickly, working towards each other; this is the moment I have to act, and who knows how many more of these moments there will be, or how long they may last?

This would be so much easier with more than 2 hands.

If a bridge is anything formed to ease passage over a drop, a dip or a potential fall, then bridges are everywhere. A spider’s web is a series of bridges - but also a home, and a trap. I’m on a friend’s deck and gum leaves have fallen across gaps in the boards. Gentle, temporary bridges across tiny abysses. Just under a year ago the leaves here were all black and charred, or ash-soft and grey. Today the colours are back, there is a cool breeze, and things feel held – suspended – at least for now.

A scent carries you, stretching your fibres, tugging at your veins, spanning a bridge between moments, memories. Elaborate architectures spring up on either side.

I am riding - or walking - and that bridge reaches out to me from the sweat behind my knees, a hidden backyard or the shadowy drapery of a back alley fence. I am taken, splayed across multitudes... across times and locations and associations all at once.

It is heavy, drunken, thick with possibility and promise.

I bury my face in it when I can. And I remember.

I’m replacing curtains with blinds at my grandmother’s flat. The first step is removing the reeded hardwood curtain rods, dusty and dry but straight and true after decades spanning the threshold between inside and out. Outside it’s getting too hot, too bright, and inside it’s full of buttons and half-made things and dust, so much dust.

She tells me it’s been too long between hugs; she knows the risks and doesn’t care.