7
I remember being ten and describing to a friend an atmosphere, an aesthetic: ‘It’s like sort of punk Halloween, you know.’ He didn’t know. Nobody did or does. A very specific thing I was trying to speak about: a bedroom, a little like my own, decorated, black window, a harsh white skull on a shelf with purple hair; the flexibility of feeling and free association of sights within the room leading to castles sat atop chasms and spiked thin things and caverns monochromed in high contrast black and white, vampires, comic books, mountains, space, and particular kinds of each.
This very thing does not exist. What I describe as a ‘feeling’ is a netted ball of neurons and branches that must exist solely for me, in my own mind, and not for anyone else, and not in the real world.
Yet I insist that it must exist in the outer world, and that life is not quite right until it does.
dead lost beaches 