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Tomorrow is the third Gallery 9700F show, and I’ve again written something as a companion piece to the exhibit itself. This exhibit is about the sense of touch, and is centered on a bed made partly of human hair. I’m excited to see what people’s reactions are going to be to the hair, whether they’ll touch it or not. Rather than exhibiting a work from architecture students, this time the work is by two art students, Austin Ballard and Paige Cochran. Austin’s blog is here so you can see some of his past work. Paige is a really great performance artist who has worked with Austin before. Here is my written piece, also about touch. It’s titled “Hard to Be.” **A disclaimer– just so any of you don’t read into anything and start wondering which girl I’ve dated is the one I’m talking about in this, not all of my writing is based on something that I’ve experienced. Some is pure fiction, some is pure past experience, and some is a mix of both. It’s up to the reader to decide which is which, and to project that assumption onto their impression of me. So this one isn’t necessarily about any girl I’ve dated.**
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We’re laying, lying, lie-ing in the backseat of my Buick. It’s Valentine’s Day and we’re spending it on some cracked tan vinyl with our hands under cloth fumbling like a first-year running back. The windows are fogged because it’s cold outside and warm in here, and condensation is a miraculous thing. The people outside can’t see in and we can’t see them but we can see their shadows block out some lights when they walk past. They can’t see us at all because there aren’t any lights inside the car to make writhing sweating shadows (the better to not see your imperfections with, my dear). She’s naked and so am I, we’re in the back and our clothes are standing in for our bodies in the front seats. My shoes have shotgun, her underwear is pretending to be our chauffeur. All I want right now is to feel the pressure of her body, her solid skin and bones, against mine. I don’t even care if we’re breathing heavy as long as I can just feel the pressure of her against me. She lies down right on top of me and my skinny body takes the burden of all her weight with the help of the padding under us. It’s a little vulgar the way her naked body puts pressure on mine. Her breasts crushing my lungs a little, her stomach flattened against mine, her hips bone-to-bone with mine, her kneecaps bent into my lower thighs, her feet brushing near my ankles. We’re not moving, we’re just lying, being, doing what we can with what we have.
In one of the creation stories, it is said that the first man got lonely so God made a woman from his rib, and this made the man complete. I wonder if he was lonely because he had nobody to talk to and walk around with, or because he had nobody to touch. I wonder if the first man knew, from his very first breath, that there ought to be a body lying next to him in the grass. And I think it sort of makes sense, in an evolutionary way down through the centuries, that we all know we are missing parts of ourselves and when we touch we are, in very real fact, filling in that missing part and completing ourselves, because we are all made from each other’s ribs. And if it’s true that matter can be neither created nor destroyed since the beginning of time, the next person you touch may be your missing rib since the beginning of time.
For some reason as we lie in the back seat I’m thinking about molecules and how everything in the world is made up of mostly space. Even solid walls, floors, the ground, trees, metal, rocks. It’s all mostly space. And so are the two of us. When she’s on top of me letting my body support hers completely our molecules smash together and we become one. Not in the biblical sense of becoming one, but in the molecular sense. The air molecules bleed into her back skin molecules which bleed into her innards molecules which bleed into her front skin molecules which bleed into my front skin and into my innards and into my back skin and into the vinyl and into the padding and into the metal and into the rubber tires and into the ground and down through the earth into China and into space and into God Himself. We are together and when we touch we are one, and it is Valentine’s Day and we are lying to each other like we do every time we trade the front seat traveling for the back seat becoming.
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