exhibition magazine by abhishek khedekar
YOU ARE THE REASON

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Show & Tell
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS

Origami Around
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roma★

izzy's playlists!
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taylor price
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Discoholic 🪩
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@theartofmadeline

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@inbetweenlove
exhibition magazine by abhishek khedekar
Wind, by Karin Hosono
Ayo Edebiri photographed by Jaša Müller for Paper Magazine
I have so many vivid dreams they get stuck in my skin. can feel them all day, weighing between layers. every now and again I dream about a lover, someone or another. it is always the same. me vying for something out of reach. a person who never quite chooses me even when they desire me. i wake up and it holds me for days. caught between the brief moment of longing, someone who is almost mine, almost wants to take a leap, almost a kiss or touch that means something. almost almost almost (like my whole life, really). and then I am faced with a feeling I can't quite explain. not full rejection. or shame. a different altogether. just a haze. how strange it is to be almost forty and have to not known a love that has an outright statement about me. how many roles i've formed and shaped, a very peculiar longing and lust. but not that person. what does it mean when even my dreams know the truth? and that i've forgotten so entirely the want of someone. the want of someone who wants me back. thinks and looks at me both wide-eyed and squinting. not just a prop or object. and it hangs so heavy, so tragically a tonne, that I most likely will never know it either. that this, especially now with this body, the closest thing i can call upon is a lucid dream of half hopes, half feelings, half a person. not much more.
The shift of no longer tolerating
• half-connections
• one-sided friendships
• breadcrumb relationships
• emotional crumbs
• forced community
• proximity without purpose
原信次 / Shinji Ihara
need some pain relief, not just a day but stretches of time so this body isn't beaten and broken. need sleep to actually restore a thing. need someone to talk to who actually listens, ears and heart-wide, and not a hollow echo. need someone who actually cares when I say that my body cannot carry anymore. need someone to hold me, a well of tears, warm skin. need someone, anyone, not to let go. need to remember what it's like to dream about something, a little inkling of hope that there can be life with this. need someone to figure one thing out for me every now and again, an act of service. need the doctors to hear me, help me. need the world to stop being an ableist exhaustion. need to feel the sun on my skin. need to be able to take a walk, blossoms in bloom, signs of life maybe. need to be able to sit somewhere else, not my home, without turning into pain the weight of so much cement. need to remember who I am, not before this, but with this. need to know who I am, not before this, but with this. need to know community again, not before this, but with this. need to find love, not before this, but with this. need to remember how to love things, not before this, but with this. need something, someone, somehow, someway to offer just a fragment of light like the crack of dawn behind a mountain, moon a tiny slither, a star or satelluite or whatever.
Reign over me (2007)
The intimacy of noticing.
one, to stay
there is so much I miss. but it’s the smallest things, the fragments that make everything a little more alive. today, when I briefly smelt the scent of wet grass, undeniable and catching me by surprise, I knew then it was myself - the meandering and wandering and just a bit always and often wide eyed woman - that lived in that. and now my life is four walls and limbs that don’t comply and a heart that falters and pain, a cumbersome amount of it, and there is nothing that beats a long walk through the city or the top deck of a bus or the park in summer a rhythm of families and children and the chorus found in going to the theatre alone or a matinee movie that cracks me open. I’ve never felt lonelier and it’s because my own company cannot fill the space that all these small, soft and fleshy things occupied.
some things change, and most do not. like this outrunning of yourself, or the loose and wavering memory that cannot hold. it shifts and cycles. circles. shapes that loop. corners always connected to one another. sure, that forms. but the thing that fills it, or doesn't, refuses. stays vacant. holds on to an impossible promise. to be more or less. more of the less or less of all this more. these days, before bed, I struggle to imagine anything beyond this immediate day. there is no future I attempt to conjure up. all I can muster is a tracing back to some point in time that may or may not have had any bearing on the weight of things. but I do it anyway. a particular memory that could have been an unknown choice. one, the one I lived out, led me to this ruin of a body - brittle and fickle and unable. or another one that I somehow denied that singular spring night. all I know is that she was beautiful. maybe, had I left with the barman - tall and terribly smooth skinned - instead of a flood of a tears, conscious of all the collapsable heartache, I could have refused the logic of what next. that that spring would be the last spring before another spring that led all springs to become the same. hopeless and without the dawn of the woman I promised myself to be.
"The fire seemed to live, go down, or die according to its own schemata. In the morning, however, it always saw fit to die."
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison at home in 1980. Photographs by Bernard Gotfryd.
If only it was warm
the harder they are to pen down, write a kind of sketch of, the more disappointing it is. something that doesn't quite take flight. ends before it ever really begins.
he says, of course, "don't be too invested in this. why would you be?" and you're trying to make sense of what you are meant to have done with any of it in the first place.
the sugar-sweet things, all that cape town sky - so bloody wide open, blue and blue and blue that you can't quite find the line that separates the ocean from all its possibility.
the night you meet him (like most other nights you've met other men - god the long list and litany) you weren't meant to go out but you do anyway. a few men had looked at you a little hungry and you know it's a go-with-the-flow night, itching for a little chaos. an old warehouse turned into arts space that feels so very hackney or peckham of things. already had one too many drinks, piled on top of another (thank god you had stuffed yourself with bread at a wine bar). there is so little light. the room is heavy on amapiano and you sit smoking at a seat by those windows that only let a slither of streetlight in.
so when he walks into the room (and they always walk into a room) and sits next to you, that mischievous smile, you are already a softened thing. a fruit too ripe. then it follows and it follows some more. he gives the right answers and takes your hand up, leading you to a couch on another floor to talk and kiss and kiss and talk, whispering into each other. you try to resist with all your might but you're still that girl who gives into skin far too easily. you kiss him on a roof top and as he pulls you into him, you say yes and yes and yes.
perhaps that is always where you go wrong. the soft outline of spooning, when a man pulls you in so close in the morning asking you not leave. those threadbare offerings - dates, drinks, the cull of promises. you believe it for a few weeks where and when he pulls you into him, nestles into that sweet spot in your neck. the misses you and likes you and wants you. the don't leaves. the fleeting will you stay. come back come back come back.
giddy and foolish you are, strolling at sunset along a lover's promenade, watching him search for mussels in the rocks of that cold, cold south atlantic ocean.
It's always ending before it begins. a tik-tok creator claims this generation is "cooked". even the lover-boys aren't lovers anymore. always treading lightly, treading water.
he rides with you the day you leaves. calls often enough after, sends messages, goes all doe-eyed when he sees you. you pay attention to the contours of him, look out for moments you can see him - not as he presents himself, but those small revealing details. who he is, who he might be, who he is not. folds hidden, shapes that begin to take shape when you look hard enough.
a leap, right? a leap that what's you're looking for. an act of faith. someone brave to be brave with you. hungry. not the lust type, but that deep and rapacious hunger you have for feeling, living, being things. a man who isn't afraid to be looked at in the moments he thinks no one is looking.
he says "don't be too invested in this. why would you be invested?" like the last few weeks weren't weeks at all. just fragmented moments of nothing but silt washed away. like intimacy only has weight when you decide you love someone or something. when you decide it has value, weighed and measured up, quantified.
you had no idea he couldn't swim, that you weren't meant to get anywhere beyond the shoreline.
and like all things, all things in a hallowed and hollowed past. names that pile up each time. d. j. a. m. n. now another n. another body to a body count you can't ever openly tell men. another past. empty space. another only passing of time. all in your head. a fabrication turned cold. reality only ever coiled into its plasticity. yours versus theirs.
"don't be too invested in this. why would you be so invested?" he says before saying, for the millionth time, that he misses you. and for the first time in over a decade you realise, that unlike all of them, you are glad you're a full and living thing. heart and marrow and flesh and teeth and muscle, bloody and moving. all you've got. unafraid to give what's meant to be given in this little and tiny life.