On the Event of Love

Nostalgia is tenderness for what was once excruciating.

Deconstructed Love

Soft/hard ground, toner transfer, & aquatint etching, blue ink on cream Rives BFK

Still, in silence, they decided to hug vanity and each other.

Soft/hard ground, toner transfer, & aquatint etching, blue ink on cream Rives BFK

[vain] We joked about how we were both vain people, [vain]
questioning the sincerity within every [sincere] act,
calling each other out on every moment of self-gratification.
“Stop performing!”
We enunciated.
Still, despite our bodily nakedness, we dreaded exposure.
Still, in silence, we decided to hug vanity and each other.
[o-e-t-a-h-c-e-r]
We grew old as the motherland returned to youth.

Light Switches

Soft/hard ground, toner transfer, & aquatint etching, blue ink on cream Rives BFK

I tried to prove to you
how the world is not
black and white
while
you turned my world
on and off.

Choking the Night, Choked by Night

drypoint, indigo ink on white Rives BFK

It was a time when night was cruel,
In my eyes, open wounds
Gaping midnight summer.

Fractions of seconds into the past,
The blind hand clutches deep blurry blue.
Only stars remembered
to breathe.

Souvenirs of Innocence

Soft/hard ground, toner transfer, & aquatint etching, blue ink on cream Rives BFK

I allow myself 20 cigarettes a year - a perfect pack, saved for moments of real anguish and occasions for performative melancholy. From every cigarette, the smoke I puff out makes out the shape of its idiocy and half-and-half sincerity-and-artifice.

In the process of mourning our love, I smoked seven. A bit over a third of my yearly ration, a proper farewell.

As I stubbed out my seventh one, the image of you began to ignite. I thought of Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, along with the 4,213 lip-stick-stained cigarette stubs the author meticulously collected, cleaned, dated and supposedly belonged to the heroine of his novel, Fusun. “Before it turned into ashes…” I suddenly had an urge to cling onto something.

Artifacts of peculiar shapes, imprints of your singular intimacy.

Yet you don’t smoke, so I have nothing to collect.

0/4213

Making the intaglio prints was my desperate surrender. Ode to the acid bath that etched both the copper plates and my pain away. To be honest, I have not thought of love for a long time and this revisiting felt more daunting than ever.

Years away from when I first learned love will pass, I shudder at this feeling that my nostalgia will one day leave me, too. An attempt to relive the love is like rehydrating a dehydrated fruit - never will it fully restore what’s lost to time, but to a messy, sticky, and untamed heart it expands. Still, I can’t resist believing that perhaps to mature does not necessarily mean having to outgrow the past, and that it’s okay to be nostalgic about nostalgia.
Memories are freeze-dried strawberries.
On my bruises [refrigerator kisses] they once kissed,
Swelling, knowing, from brittle sweetness,
A sticky monster will ripen again.