It seems we are in the brainstorming phase of this specific project of mine. Woke up in the middle of the night from dreams of endless buildings leading to hallways to end in elevators that simply open their doors to open to an empty block with more buildings waiting for me to climb through them. Every single night I visit this maze of empty windows and doors. Stairways and elevators taking me up and down. All over and yet always in the same place. Nothing is ever different and I wake feeling chased and tired.
When I woke up yesterday in the middle of the night with only two words clinging through the haze of half-awake shuffling to go pee real quick, they stayed with me. I sat down and heard it. I climbed back in bed and started snuggle into the perfect sleep position until I heard them again. Grief Terminal. Forced myself to grab my phone and jot a note down to further explore these words and why they seemed to be echoing around me. Is the city I endlessly climb through the Grief Terminal? What does it make me think of? Do others resonate with these words?
So much of my life and art has been a curation of who I believed people wanted to see reflected back at them. So here we start a new project where we use this space that I feel has been spoken into existence around me. We begin the vast and unending task of unravelling what this world holds and how we can hold each other better. The Grief Terminal is everything and it is nothing. It is whatever you would like it to be and also nothing that is made for you. I didn’t realize for the longest time that The Grief Terminal for me is a hospital waiting room that I see my 5 year old self standing alone in. I didn’t realize how much time had passed. How much that girl had grown during all this time. How much that girl wanted to leave. Leave to a place where things are better. And maybe that doesn’t mean non-existence or an angrily resigned performance of daily duties.
Maybe The Grief Terminal can be anything you need it to be. Maybe it isn’t the enemy beating down on me with flourescent lights blinking chaos. Maybe it’s a space between things. Transitions and fluid motion around the devastation of loss. A place to find the beautiful things that do end up being created in this abyss created by loss. That there is no loss in atoms when you die but they take new shape. Nothing is ever really Gone because something Will Always Take It’s Place. I don’t plan to edit myself much or become rigid in what this needs to be.
I am interested though, in what others can see and build from these diary like word-vomit exercises in connection and expression. Here we go, let’s keep doing things we love and try to see that in the empty space left behind there is already something else being made in it’s image. May not look the same but it’s just rearranged. Metamorphosis if you will. Give us your thoughts and vulnerability and I promise the same in return. We honor every version of you here. Lets see what happens.
Hello Bloomability 