My heart is an old museum
and the museum guard with his girded belly would never know you tore up the morning streets with cries the size of kitchen knives, once, before silently rearranging the room to make sure it left no gaps where your furniture had been removed. It was done to perfection; only the books looked a little crestfallen where their twin editions were abducted. There you are, idling in the corner of reason when I turn a folding screen and approach you and see how carelessly you let your breath gather up on the glass, in luminous, feathered circles. Your turn seems unusually well-timed when I sidle up to you with hopes of planting a small kiss on your brushed cheek (you were always master of the artful dodge). All this was bracketed by the shrill call-and-response of whistles at the train platform where you finally left me; one pair of prosthetic voice boxes assuring each other, in all the ways we could not.
The grammar of time is emergent. Friends said things to the effect of ‘time will tell’, and other phrases with a misplaced sense of ominous knowing. Only my indefatigable refrain could force them to resort to this; I know that when I am sad I have no resolve and indulge my obsessions with ‘what went wrong’ and who-did-what and time runs on with the continuity Bergsonian duration, which I’ve no wherewithal to explain, being hopelessly sleep deprived, and it was months of exhausted clichés before the same friends garnered sufficient courage to ask, very tentatively, ‘are you over her yet’. I am but a semaphore wanting for naught. You can lose the sole of your shoe just as easily on your way to a wedding, it seems, so here I am: trying to forget that that’s exactly where I’d clumsily revealed I’d been reading everything I could find about you online.
Today I find you in the Southeast Asian quad of the museum, and your gaze is arrested by a moulting piece hailing from Vietnam. It is produced by a technique I dare not pronounce (sơn ta, the plaque reads) and you speak of it as a ‘process of inversion, that nevertheless produces a palimpsest’. I wish to say something about Marker’s Statues Also Die but think only of your breath in my mouth. Astride the beam of your thought (now a rumination on the methods of the ancients in relation to time and proportion involving jute string and nails), forget it, it no longer matters. It’s kind of embryonic in here; there is no movement but our stirrings, only depth and hollows and the most of gorgeous eyebags which I have always worshipped. Our interaction is conditioned by impossibility so instead I train my focus on avoiding ill-fated attempts at inordinately complex words that just wind up entangling me in awkward syntactical constructions. Of course, these are the formulations that adoring you were made up of, and nothing makes me feel safer than recourse to formula.
I am the happiest simply being entrusted with your museum locker key, and every so often I finger it lovingly in my pocket. Certain rooms of the museum harbour a stillness that hardens or gapes, others draw spider threads from where I stand to all the dark corners of the room. (The girded belly lumbers behind us, cheesily scratching itself.) If I take the time to overthink this, we are our very own examples of indexing and ruin, for which museum conservation provides too perfect an analogy. A structure is made to surrender itself to representation, before duly being destroyed. (To shore up against our years is unforgivably hard to do in your presence.) When I call you by your private nickname, I sound like a progressively degenerating feedback loop that tarnishes itself as it haplessly stutters on, but still, it conjures that weather-worn image of us delightedly discovering Basinski. You are not playing my game though, and so I find myself pleading with my reflection in the face of an old, Czech clock. Is imperfection the only reliable feature of anything; the very style of substance?
Among these objects of conquest (which we agree need repatriating, as an aside), your iciness finally thaws and the between the fading summits of your peaks dawns the senselessness of loss. Bourgeois restraint forbids our tear from leaving your duct so you quip the much-quipped ‘unprecedented for our times’, as if you were one of Brecht’s newspaper fragments swept up in the maelstrom of a collage. I am just another museum donation of an uncertain make, age and pedigree, falling into a plume of obscurity, your box titled ‘miscellaneous’. The silence of the museum is deafening, like heaven, or second to. Except nothing is forever; your ringtone is a 1990s lyric that reaches out into the stretches of an adjacent hallway and beyond it, to where you wander. Interrupting us is your mildly irritating best friend, a curator, who strictly refers to himself as an ‘organiser’ in all public communication. Outside the pigeons absent-mindedly pattern the sidewalk within the fold of the season; even they know love that little bit better.
Elaine ML Tam