Snatch The Broken Moment
Paper aiding sentimentality and the course of memory. A slap in the face -- stop waiting for permission dammit!
I love the smell of paper. Thick, musky, explored. Captured between bookshelves. Note scrawled, taxidermized, exposed to sunlight. To the elusive cover of night. Lived life in New York City basements or on the Eurostar. Transported between twilights, between callused hands or smooth, brand-new ones. Coffee stained. Bookmarked with corner shop receipts, with Snapple labels or Schnapps ones, with unpeeled stickers, with Maoam wrappers. Wine wrung. I love the taste of ink on the mind’s tongue. Substantial like kohl liner. Corpulent and choreographed, writhing on the page like a worm resurfacing after rainfall. Refreshing and relentless all in one sentence. I love the feeling of texture; imprinted, exported, proposed, performative, expansive.
***
I’m holding a booklet of paper samples. Uninspired by my job and the countless spreadsheets I’m shackled to, I grab the G.F Smith booklet thinking now was as good a time as any to explore its contents. I have been thinking about making another zine, deterred only by the constant reminders of my lack of ‘proper’ publishing. I’ve held onto so much work in the hopes that I would get published in the type of magazine or journal that would signal to everyone else, ‘yes, she is worthy’. For the most part I’ve received a series of rejection emails. One after another stating an iteration of the same message --- Your work is great! We really enjoyed reading it! BUT… it doesn’t fit into our publication. My mountain of sentiments sits collecting dust in my MacBook. I suppose this is part of a writer’s miserable condition. The exhibition that is currently being set up in the other room calls back to my original love for zines – Made Without Permission --- the idea that an artist creates without waiting to be told, without waiting for the grandfathered hand of institution to pat them on the back and good-job-kid! them. Creating without waiting for the elite to catch up is a revolutionary act. Outsider communities do this to enact survival. To make space for exploration, to exist as works-in-progress, to find truth along the way. To express without the restrictions of a starting point or shape to fit into. My plasticine body is allergic to silhouetting. This excites me but I remind myself that even the most inspired can fall hopelessly faithful to their own delusions of grandeur. I’m no Eileen Myles. I look down, a sheet of G.F Smith Parch Marque in Ochre sits proudly on my lap. I am transported.
It’s 2002. The scratchy teal carpets of our apartment rub my knees, re-initiating the parting of fibres already commencing their pilgrimage outward. My mother just quit her job. She’s sat on the couch holding her aching hands. She gestures in long strokes to my dad, telling him what’s happened. I can sense her exhaustion in the breakbeat between the movement of lips and hands. Her tempo is a waltz, a legato driven by her apologetic nature and the consequences of her departure. Accelerando, her annoyance bubbles up and I take it as my cue to stop staring. My eyes retain the same propensity as sticky hand toys. Instead, I occupy myself with the cardboard box in front of me. In an act of defiance, she stole it from the factory before leaving. Peeling the rectangular lid off like a spy attempting to procure their loot, I peek. Sheets of peach marbled paper sit stacked over another set of blue, the shade of last summer’s skyline sitting in the park with a cold can of coke. I pull them out meticulously so as to not disturb my parent’s concerto. A gradient of pastels shifts every 20 or so sheets. They are thick and marbled, soft to the touch. I think about my paper dolls, the thin sheets of bleach white printer paper glued together in the shape of a woman. My hand runs over the peach sheets entranced by its somewhat skin-like colour.
I put the G.F. Smith booklet down and text my mom. It’s 5pm so it must be an acceptable time, I think. I don’t know what it is I am looking for. She texts me back instantly, remembering the paper cuts but not the shade. I send her a picture to jumpstart, she laughs and remembers the drama of the factory. It felt as though every exploitative job in Salt Lake City housed all my family members, or perhaps every illegal Latinx my parents ever worked with became like family. She recounts the hierarchy, I recall only the paper.
***
I look up at Nick from between my pages, a quicksilver glance, find a moment between the blinking sets. His eyes and my eyes express the fidelity of peace. He smiles, slowly but surely and looks down to his own ink — a great big mess of greyscale limbs, of urban-city planning in presumptuous print, of paper resplendent. Two beats syncopate. I stab my thumb with the needle, piercing paper and skin.