I sit at the desk with a piece of paper in front of me.
The piece of paper has four corners.
Each edge is the same length.
I think about that room that I used to sleep in.
The room was the width of the length of a three-quarter bed.
I line up the edge of the piece of paper that is closest to me
with the edge that is furthest away.
I check that the two overlapping corners on the left line up perfectly.
I check that the corners on the right do as well.
For a while, I had a plant growing in an old plastic honey jar
On the windowsill.
The thing had been pulled out of the gutter of the house.
I loved it because it was a stubborn thing.
I use my left hand to hold down the lined-up edges.
I run my right hand over the paper to flatten it.
I open the piece of paper.
A fold runs across the middle of the page.
In the end, we had to unscrew the top of the big desk from its four legs
in order to get it through the back door
and down the back stairs.
I wish I had thought to do that earlier.
Instead, I had turned it on its short side and tried to angle it
through the doorway of the front room.
I rotate the piece of paper by ninety degrees, clockwise.
When that didn’t work, I turned it onto its long side and did the same.
I line up the edge of the piece of paper closest to me
with the edge furthest away.
I scraped a lot of paint off the door frame.
I gave up trying to get the table into the room.
I slid it back along the passageway to the sun-room.
The blue shower mat between the table edge and the gridded parquet floor.
I turned it upright.
I wondered if there was a use to a table on its side.
I run my hand over the paper to make a fold.
I open the piece of paper.
There is a second fold running across the page.
The second fold lies perpendicular to the first fold.
I slept in each of the three rooms during the nineteen months that I lived in that city.
I line up the edge closest to me with the fold in the middle of the page.
I run my hand across the page to score the fold.
I open the piece of paper.
I rotate the piece of paper ninety degrees clockwise.
I line up the closest edge with the fold in the middle of the page.
I run my hand across the page.
I open up the piece of paper.
I rotate the piece of paper by ninety degrees, clockwise.
I make a fold halfway between the closest edge and the middle fold.
I unfold the piece of paper.
I rotate the piece of paper by ninety degrees.
I fold the bottom half of the piece of paper in half.
I unfold the paper.
The first room was full of horizontal lines cast through the blinds that were always half closed in the daytime.
Horizontal lines cast onto the vertical lines of the cupboards that spanned too many of the walls.
The piece of paper has been divided into sixteenths.
Four cells from left to right.
Four cells from top to bottom.
All cells are equal in width and height.
When winter came, I moved into the sun-room.
The room faced the mountain and the sunrise.
Glass prisms hanging in the window cast rainbows onto the walls.
We fold the row of cells closest to us in half.
We unfold and now have two rows where there was before one.
Five months before the end I moved into the front room.
It was the biggest of the three.
We fold the second row in half.
We unfold.
It was the first door to the right if you came in through the front door.
It was the last door on the left if you came in through the back.
It didn’t have cupboards.
We fold the third row in half.
We unfold.
There were burglar bars on the windows.
The fluorescent light of the second-floor parking lot next door was never switched off, except during load-shedding.
We fold the fourth row in half.
We unfold.
We rotate the paper clockwise by ninety degrees.
A door lead outside to a balcony.
We fold all four rows in half.
In the end, we scrubbed the chalk off the outside walls.
We unfold.
The blue and the red stained the hardest.
We now have an eight-by-eight grid.
I fold the grid into sixteenths horizontally and vertically.
We used to sit on the plastic crates in the mornings with our coffee and toast and the bougainvillea growing too tall and creeping over the balcony wall.
I fold the sixteenths into thirty seconds.
I used to sit out there in the 3 a.m. fluorescent-city-din and look over at the two-story long ventilation shaft, and the round window, and the empty grey wall.
I describe this compounding process of folding using a geometric sequence:
one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two.
In the end, all that was left there were three empty rooms and the passageway.
I can’t go back because someone else lives there now.
The End.
Tell Me Nicely (Please), That You Are Leaving Again. Chalk, Charcoal, Ink and Collage on Canson Paper
Tell Me Nicely (Please), That You Are Leaving Again., forms part of the group exhibition artwords on text and image at the Gallery at Glen Carlou. It can be viewed along with a selection of other works by Maia (Levan) Lehrer-Sacks until 5 November.
The post artwords ‒ The grid that folds: I can’t go back because someone else lives there now first appeared on LitNet.
The post <i>artwords</i> ‒ The grid that folds: I can’t go back because someone else lives there now appeared first on LitNet.