THE COAT
I have asked people that I know or did not know before to put on this coat covered with paper cranes and to close their eyes.
I want to look at their faces as they become or try to become calmer, at the way they hold their hands, or grip the coat’s edges.
After they open their eyes they often tell me that it was soothing to listen to the sea with their eyes closed, or that everything looks different afterwards.
I would like to know how it would be possible to heal someone either by mere touch, or more specifically, by placing a piece of cloth over them, wrapping them in a coat, a large scarf, a blanket, as all their pain and trouble goes out of them through that surface.
I also made the coat to show how I feel about my life: sometimes it is dark. But over this black coat, white birds come to rest, once in a while, and I find myself relieved for a moment because of their beauty, and because in their lightness they take upon them my burden.
Livia Marinescu 2012
I always cut off a part of the flowers’ stems – after I bring them home - because air bubbles go up the stems and water cannot reach them anymore. And then I place them in a vase and look at them. I make a big mistake I hurt someone that’s when I run out and buy white flowers.
The flowers I buy are only from supermarkets because they are infected with neon light and thus they know so much more about flowers.
And then I like to hand the bunch to the person behind the counter and to hear them asking me:
‘Anything else for you today?’ ‘No, thank you, this is all for today.’
It has been going on for years, choking on these air bubbles.
I did that again a few nights ago without meaning to. I was very hungry in the middle of the night, I took a lump of bread and
ate it there in the dark
in that dark under the blanket.
That’s when I remembered when we were small and how we kept the bread in a plastic bag on that wooden shelf at the end of our bed.
At night we woke up and ate by tearing from it.
We slept in the crumbs Sheltered.
How different it feels to do this when you understand, when you think you understand.
I am a body full of cancer in a field full of flowers. Or maybe in a supermarket of flowers.
'Sometimes I am her body, or someone else’s body who had pain living in them like in a house.'
On that day, I first wrote her name in my phone with the word ‘mother’ after it. And then I realised what had happened and I wrote her name in my phone with the word ‘mother’ before it.
the days have grown longer, you see? it is still cold but let us walk through
your eyes are big and so peaceful. such eyes as children draw when they are alone. when they are left with God
blue meadows shelter our light togetherness
we walk inside green solitude
my fear takes the shape of a flower it opens then closes unto those years that passed. It is time.
I will say it again for the last time:
I am afraid.
---
where will a rabbit running over blue meadows find its food tonight?
will the running be hunger? will the distance be food?
but your soft voice is near, and someone else nearer and nearer
Have you ever noticed how water tastes different after you cried?
When we go by car, I am stuck to the window, because I want to show you all the white horses we find on the way there. And you neither look, nor move. I sent you a postcard with horses, and I wondered if you patted the paper.
And if you did, then I must have been here on a bus in that very moment and a horse must have been here in the field.
A.
azi vii să mă vezi inima ta caldă o să se urce într-un avion mare
mai știi cum duminica, noi mâncam șnițel de pui și eu mă uitam la startrek ca să aflăm data
stelară
surioară,
mi-e atât de rău înăuntru încât aș înghiți pământ doar ca să mă îngreunez cumva, să pot să atârn de ziua asta
tu nu știi, atunci eu mă dădeam bătută și câștigai la jocuri, și nu știi cum noaptea și ziua, și ziua și noaptea citeam pe ascuns de tine ‘cuore,
inimă
de copil’ azi vii să mă vezi
și îmi ceri să te poftesc înăuntru și să îți pun masa dar
mie, surioară, mi-a fost așa de rău înăuntru și inima mea nu a umblat în dragoste și nu găsit nimic din ce îmi ceri pentru că aici avionul ăla mare îmi intră zilnic în inimă
At this moment: a song
I once had a loaf of bread. I cut it in three but the birds wouldn’t eat it. I stood still for a year and for a year I stood still.
and from a distance they said: You forgot how to bake and you forgot how to listen.
I think about dying very often in my everyday life. It is not the kind of thing that you’d tell someone when you first meet them, it would not help you get a job or do your laundry.
It’s just one of those things that comes to you when you change the water in the vase, or when you’re on the bus and you see
a child and a mother:
a passenger gets on. The child turns around to look at them, to follow them as they find their seat.
The child stares.
‘Turn around, turn around child, and be still.’
The only thing I've learned in all these years is
to wait
under the water until they forget about you. And then just as you feel you're drowning, --you slowly start breathing through someone else's mouth.
This is an ongoing project. If you would like to wear the coat, please write to me at: marinescu.livia@gmail.com