The wind that rips through my fleece, throwing mousey-brown hair across my face, is not you jumping on the bed to wake me up. It is not you steering me. It is just the movement of air caused by the uneven heating of the earth.
The relentless winter downpour was not you drumming your fingers on the window to remind me of how much you loved the rain. It is just water droplets that condense from atmospheric water vapour and then fall under gravity.
The air does not contort in your absence. It does not thin in the spaces you once occupied, has not been consumed into voids. It does not try and suck me towards you. Air is the mixture of invisible gases that surrounds the earth.
Breath is not sacred. I cannot find you in its rhythmic turn. It is simply the air taken into or expelled from the lungs.
Those tiny cells of yours that leached into the water. I see them magnified like textbook diagrams, drifting with the current. When really, these microscopic particles are long-vanished.
The silent dust that floats in motes at golden hour is not your splintered soul filtering the dimming light. It is made of fine particles of solid matter, a mix of sloughed-off skin cells, hair, clothing fibres, bacteria, dust mites, bits of dead bugs, soil particles, and pollen.
A series of twenty-four monoprints using aluminium etching and erasure on Fabriano paper, displayed in a horizontal line and punctuated with poetry. A film is projected on the opposite wall.
