Scenes

A man and a woman in a room, barely looking at each other. Heavy silence has settled in the room and in this silence they sit, each with a thought of their own, excluding the other. One wonders what they can possibly have to tell to one another…

A scene with similar settings but a different context.

A man and a woman, this time facing each other, while the necessity to speak brings anticipation that drifts in the room. She is hurt and is waiting for him to speak, to make a move in a word or an action. She has an urge to get up and put her arms around him, yet pride makes her remain where she is. He is baffled and confused for he does not understand what he has done wrong to make her act the way she does. It pains him and in his turn he is waiting for her to speak. An awkward silence prevails.

Two in a room, her back turned to him, while he restlessly paces the floor. Tension growing in silence, tension that rejects, is repulsive. Unable to stand any longer he walks towards the door and steps out, closing the door quietly behind him. She hears it, but remains where she is, without even turning her head toward the door.

***
Once, long in the past, in real life, she ran after him, down the stairs and into the street, where she caught up with him and took him by the hand. They walked together, without speaking, holding hands and avoiding looking at each other.

They returned late at night to the same room, where they lit candles and sat in each others arms, still not speaking. They fell asleep, on the floor, while the candle slowly died in the dark.

***
Now i no longer run after you, you no longer stop to look back, we've had too many scenes of silence, they do not matter anymore, only the haunting heavy presence of the other, the desire to escape, to be elsewhere... Now i am only glad when you slam the door and leave, or else i run out of the door, away, away from this dark and destructive place, the eye of the storm that will inevitably swipe away everything and send me off spinning.

....

it's dark in the house, dark in my room, we either screwed all the light bulbs out, or we deliberatlely do not turn the lights on, hoping that the darkness will hide us, protect us, save us from looking at each other, from cruel confrontation... darkness is soft, it's soothing, warm, protective, ever absorbing and there really is no need to talk, to look at each other, to see the other's face, pale, pained and confused. Darkness soothes the pain, the confusion, we're merely two people in a house, each in a separate room, and we know it's the end and darkness brings acceptance.

...

And I sit and think, sit and think, as I finally have the time and luxury to sit doing nothing else.

No one can be held as a source of your contempt. Or maybe it's me who's being held in contempt, held captive in something that lacks the power to nourish. Who is it to blame or is it really necessary to have someone to blame?

The past couple of days were spent in a haze. The house is in disarray. Chaotic days, days without shape, with no destination, no apparent relation to anything familiar, estranged days, weightless, shapeless days. Days spent neither here nor there but rather in a place deep within myself.

And today i wake up feeling pacified. I’m amazingly calm, happy and relieved. The decision that at first was being forced upon me found its resolution and the resolution brought relief. Suddenly i feel such an elevation that it feels as if i’m weightless. i do have a destination now, i do know what i need to do and where i will be going now. And i have an incredible feeling of freedom, again, the kind of feeling when only the sky’s a limit and i’m slowly letting go...i'm going home...

To reach a point where one realizes that love is not the most important thing in life, to realize that happiness is not the only priority or aspiration, that there is more to life than finding self-realization in a relationship and someone else, to reach a point where personal freedom and the need for self-expression are of pressing emergency, that the voice that’s been put to sleep deep within oneself has awaken and now speaks of desires and aspirations that go beyond the limits of the current life, beyond the confinement of a relationship... to reach that point and realize that it is possible to carry on one’s existence without the other, that there is another life, not of the impossible future but the life that is possible, tangible, real... the life alone, the life without...

With or without you...
So liberating
With or without you...

I can live with or without you... without you... without

Outrospective

If you place a thing into the center of your life,
that lacks the power to nourish,
it will eventually poison everything that you are
and destroy you.
A simple thing as an idea
Or your perspective of yourself of the world
No one can be the source of your contempt.
It lies within you,
in the center.

Faithless
Evergreen

This day of all days...

It’s that time of the year. That very month. It’s the day. This day of all days and I’m miles away under a radiant sky and around glorious palms... Elsewhere the sky is heavy and overcast, the ground glazed with ice, trees, magnificent buildings and broad streets covered in snow...

Yerevan, gray and dull in February, almost lethargic and yet how much I miss it right now, on this very day, how much i miss the mood, the state matching with the month. Nostalgia, a wistful longing for a moment in the past, a particular event, a mood, emotional state.


Two years, two whole years and I am still having seconds thoughts, still allowing myself to return to the event, living through it, speculating over the outcomes other than what followed, what has shaped my present now. My heart still hurts when I think about it, that time, the house, the city, the gallery, the artist, our meetings, the snow, the cold and me, dazed and restless, sleepwalking and yet awake, only wakeful in some other kind of reality where I was free of circumstances binding me... and yet, even in that life i would to be bound, not as much to the idea of him but to my own solitude.

And two years ago I wrote

"I open the door to chaos and let chaos in. I plunge myself into it headfirst, letting it consume me more and more. I become a tiny ripple caught in the storm, swirling rapidly in a downward spiral.
Drifting away from what used to hold me once. Drifting away from the future that lay before me unfulfilled."

"I draw a scene. It's dull and barren. I color it gray and let shadows swallow the light. I watch the light grow dim. The outlines blur and the air thickens.

I create a mood— I let the mood create itself out of the scene.
I draw the mood... I draw myself in it— small, dark, brittle, almost transparent.
I watch myself from above, I watch the mood drift through the thick air. The entire scene is on my palm. I let long hours pass as the slanted rays slide over the scene and there I remain, shivering in the wind, looking dolefully at the sky."

And today I write

"February and the sun is bright. Outside my window palm trees stretch towards the sun. The sky is blue, the kind of blue that can only be seen in a place that does not know cold. And yet I think about a place, that place under a different sky, laden with heavy clouds, the world white and trees covered with snow. And i long for winter, for the snow. Somewhere there, under a different sky, I could’ve had a different life. Somewhere there I would be waking up to snow and not to sunshine. Somewhere under a different sky I would be in the city, with a chance of running into him in the crowd. Somewhere in that other life i would be living in one of the old buildings made and carved in stone, and somewhere in that other life there would be a chance that he’d come knocking on my door only to be gone the next morning. But as long as i lived that other life, under a different sky, there would always be a chance of running into him in one of those art galleries - giddy with wine, he would take me home with him, and maybe, just maybe another masterpiece would be born of the outlines of my curves in bold strokes on canvas that he'd cover by a cloud of golden mist..."



I am repeating myself, over and over again, the same thought, dressed in different clothes, made of different words, appears again, and again and again, and i walk in circles. with this idee fixe. Will writing it down set me free? Will i be able to leave the event behind, to hang the canvas on a wall of some unknown gallery of the past and walk away?

I feel like I'm running out of time, and I'm full of longing, the most painful longing and wistful nostalgia for a place that stands now as the very symbol of my freedom and solitude.

Yerevan...