Creamed Blush, 2020-2022
I stand in front of the mirror applying lotions and creams onto my skin, working them in with the tips of my fingers then whole hands; I feel their warmth transfer to my skin. I see the dark circles that have grown darker as I've slept less and less over the past few years—I focus more tenderness there. Pressing creamed blush into my cheeks to appear freshly in from brisk air I think to myself how nice it is to be in a routine, to feel useful and needed.
Today I'm going to work, I'll be walking through downtown closer to people than I should be. Within a few months this distance will shrink further down to 6 feet and eventually nothing. Up Keefer Street right across from the soccer field and to the gate at work. Door locked separated from the outside I turn on music and set the store just as it would be on a regular day.
Just a few weeks later I'd loose my routine. Days began to collapse on themselves and expand equally as much. An hour is a second, a day, a week, a month. Still now, over two years later time plays a satirical role in my life.
Closed Eyes, 2019-2022
Monica Lewinsky influenced my life; haven’t we all fallen in love with someone we weren’t supposed to? I think of how her hurt made my love feel more valid—made space for a growing heart. I’ve fallen in love on the ride home from work, looking at the person sitting across from me. Our eyes meet, and in a moment I feel years of sweet nothings, and sunlit Sunday mornings; they glance down at their phone.
I remember watching Martha after school. Entrenched in a world of effortlessly flipped omelettes and refinished painted porches. It was so easy to imagine myself in a world that existed so comfortably in the infrathin of reality and make believe. Sitting in the backyard by our koi pond, I’d day dream looking over an acreage—easily ignoring the metal shed and cracked paving blocks. I lost my pet painted turtle in that pond.
Reminiscing on the countless unanswered letters I wrote to Martha during that time. I realize that I never truly expected to receive a response. As hopeful as I was, I always knew those letters would land upon closed eyes.
Waiting on the door mat when I got home for lunch, the turtle came back the next summer.
Asteroid Salve, 2020
Zach Polis reads of an asteroid coming in particles so small we may not even notice. Before this seems so distant from the now, and tomorrow further still. Will there be a time again when we’re no longer scared to embrace those who mean most? Time’s blurring; days and somehow weeks seem to blow by and equally take forever to pass. I always joked with friends about how nice it’d be to retire early, but this isn’t what I had in mind. I hadn’t imagined feeling trapped in my own home, within my own arms reach. Instagram shows everyone finding ways to be productive, and yet I find myself barely able to get out and bed and showered. It should be easy with all this time, but between the daily press briefings there seem to be only a few moments to make food and curl in bed. My partner’s heart beat upon my skin keeps me calm and present. The small of their neck is my salve, their voice is my salve, the way they look at me with compassion is my salve. Lauren Wetmore taught me that time itself was unprecedented, and that is what makes all time the same.
I’ve been ruminating about the words in bell hook’s Teaching To Transgress ever since I read it a few weeks ago. She speaks of all the ways that language itself can alter our way of understanding ideas and spreading knowledge. That by writing and speaking words that are altogether too academic we hinder the ability of so many to enter our thoughts. I imagine it as a way of loosening language, allowing it to be with its surroundings—giving language its own voice. This liquid medium that can fill every void around it between every crevice, into every ear.
These tiny bits of asteroids will never fully wash clean from our clothes. They’ll be something we find in years to come baked onto our window sills while cleaning after winters past.
One Three Two Four, 2020
One
One
In between hours of work and school I make my way to the studio. Unpack my bag, taking off my shoes and sit at the loom. There’s a smell in the air that’s only amplified with the heat of the radiator, it’s a mixture of grass and wet animal, sometimes our dog would smell like this in the rain. I sit at the loom, this stool who’s rolling wheels I took off at my mothers suggestion that I’d gain more stability grounds me, allowing me to push down on the treadles with ease; my weight teetering on the edge. I press down the treadles and throw the shuttle between the yarns. The bobbin spinning makes a twirling sound, I bring down the beater and the loom rattles.
Three
It’s as dark as a city gets outside, there's a humming sound of cars driving by and street lights beaming. It’s raining and I contemplate hailing a cab home, but the walk is only another 32 minutes, I have to be at work pretending to be awake in 5 hours. Ira Glass introduces a story of a Black journalist who’s family moved to Russia from the states searching for a better life, I make a mental note to look her up later. My feet are waking in the motion of the treadles, I feel like I haven’t stopped thinking in weaving for a few months. I woke up yesterday feeling like I was already at the loom.
Two
There’s a juvenile joy in eating a pink popsicle on a white couch.
Four
My mother is sitting beside me so I can listen to her while I work away. She tells me stories of when she moved away from home with my father to contrast my frustrations of being an adult. She tells me that seeing me weaving reminds me of her father weaving on his barn loom, but makes an observation that while I’m weaving blankets, he wove sarapes. I find this both hilarious and troubling. I’ve been trying to find this knowledge and somehow missed an important detail. Her voice fades as I imagine long sarapes cascading down from ceilings.
Y Mis Huesos se Sienten Viejos, 2019-2020
I learned to be ashamed of my brown skin. Television taught me that I belonged to a culture that could only be portrayed by drunk men in sombreros. I made distance, repressed my history and promoted the fraction of European blood my last name holds.
A fascination with textiles led me to my history, investigating the work of my grandfather and the culture I come from. I learn that the craft of my grandfather was in ways a colonial project, that even in the central mountains of Mexico colonialism made a lasting mark.
I work my fingers through threads stretched on the loom, hoping that my grandfathers hands will become my own. That his knowledge will awaken inside of me through the blood that we share. I wonder if it's a fruitless pursuit to search for togetherness with a man I barely know; a man I couldn’t understand.
Working with woollen yarn I sit,
working line by line, thread by thread
over under
over under
Imagine the length, the distance that this could cover.