Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Room Traveller
The rooms had become unfamiliar to me, drifting off to discover their own separate identities. I moved now from one enclosed space to another not knowing where to tread, sometimes getting completely lost, as if I was instead crossing the borders of previously undiscovered towns or countries. I struggled to keep up with the ongoing conventions that were continually attaching themselves to each individual space I entered. It was becoming impossible to keep a track of everything. The changing cupboard spaces and seating arrangements required constant alterations of my body configuration, indeed if a chair or large ornament were moved then that room’s space would then become an entirely new area complete with new feelings and ergonomic demands upon me. At times it felt that I was surely being coerced into becoming a foreign traveller in my own home, my role now being reduced to tidying up after it and attending to the routine menial tasks like washing up and taking the bin out.
Yes, I could move around in whatever way or which ever direction that I wanted to, but then, out of intuition or merely by accident, I would find myself knocking into the jutting angle of a newly placed book or a casually laid box dropped awkwardly across a low lying coffee table. I would find myself falling, having to angle my body out of the way of objects in order to direct myself towards the horizontal carpet, landing like a giant Godzilla actor onto the artificially lit model landscape compiled of pens, pencils and heaps of dust covered papers. After first stabilising from the shudder of the impact, looking left and right to gauge my position, I would raise my chin up to assess the corners of the space above me. High up there amongst the light shades and light bulbs a new space would be caste into being, narrower and taller than the incarnations of the room that I had previously noted. My mind would then instinctively process new rules in order to secure the area.
