Memory as cosplay in a dark room.
Others cosplay with you, perpetuating a game and masquerade, rituals membered, by which we find ourselves assuming patterns and assimilating forms.
Alone, again alone, and at once alone, where others, and their penchant for masquerade, their desire for escape, keeps you favored company. Immaterial though they may be, they are vivid, glaring in their absence, chock full of resonance, and registering a quality which can be coined pleasingly poetic.
They laugh soundlessly, a nod to silent film, their mouths convey whorish monsters, eyes hotly baked with desire—it is that unspeakable passion coupled with hungry ghost that keeps you returning to the dark room. The dark room is a disaster with grace in tow. Or grace with disaster lingering ominously. The dark room is a best seller that no one reads. The dark room is grief and grief’s theriomorph. The dark room is interstellar. The dark room is somebody’s romantic notion of a grail. The dark room is an open wound through which many seasons can pass. The dark room is cherry cough syrup and TV when you are a sick and needy child. The dark room is a church of no origins, no religious affiliations, a womb-like hovel and shrine. The dark room is the honeymoon suite where one and one, new and new, tangle in nuptial fever and conjugate full-body music. In other words, or in these words masquerading as others: Memory is cosplay with limitless variations.
