The same things have been circulating as of late: similar wonderings, arriving in different forms, from different lips.

World-making; nothing but us and ‘the anthropocene’; ‘portals’; old flames; water crises; feeding our chosen families; our bodies; our labourings; half-time zones, deep-time, full-time, future-time, all of the time.

We write on planes; sleep with each other in laundry rooms; make art between walks and meals and life. We stay in one place, seemingly with irreversible speed. Someone coined this once, ‘the pain of staying put’; the pain of something rendered unrecognizable in front of our eyes; the pain of the uncanny, a home now uninhabitable.

A clumsy conglomerate of nostalgia, desolation, solace: solastalgia, a form of homesickness we experience when we are still, in all accounts, ‘home.’

Pick apart the letters of a word. Leave out the consonants. Assemble them. Pick another, leave only the vowels. Count them with your toes: “O-E,” “O-E.” In the car as a child you silently count utility poles by flexing the muscles in your legs. You hear that the northern lights own a sound, and that the water we wash with is older than the sun itself.

A spider plant throws its babies down, like escapees on bed sheets tied together. Cosmonaut-certified, these spiderettes filter indoor air pollution, our breath, colour image negatives, an over-cooked dinner, dusty bathroom grates. Taxonomically polyphyletic, spider plants are “those which have multiple origins.” The polyphyletic share no common ancestor, no tie or mutuality aside from the trait that holds them together. Is this trait in us, our collective desire to assemble, our compulsion to ‘make’?

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, how far can our bodies bend to salvage, discover, and capsize. Out-of-reach of fingers, minds look underneath, half-moons sit atop each other like ship windows—an oculus before the rift.

In our feverish dreams, our minds upturn what is found, a warm hand cups another, walls become bare, curtains are hemmed.

In the frame of an image, glass sits atop a circular wrought iron table. Cropped, we only see a quarter of it, the rim rests almost at the edge. It reflects what it is outside of itself: a blue bird sky, a lemony house with dark French shutters, an awning, and underneath, cracked concrete, rusted metal, a cherry red seat of a chair. On top: a metal wingnut, an iodized paperclip, a crushed dandelion, discarded steel. Hovering above, a small hand enters the frame, holding a circular silvery disk reflecting the sky.

At the centre of five million miles of boreal snow forest, a family slept through a war. On a precipice, facing forward, we pick up the phone, our hurried conversations pace like feet; this pace is our body’s resistance against us, its own ineffable judgment.

Judgment extends to our compulsions. Vitality is urgent in the objects that we upturn, assemble; rid of any honey-eyed nostalgia. The contents of our “O-E”’s transformed for future purpose, our nail beds entirely earth.

There is an utterance of urgency in all images. What is the shape of a key? Our own blinked delay only sees the past. Our hands must form future vessels, spaces where memory is not fetishized, but repurposed. So much in progress.