They Draw You Out

With caution, I enter a room, from ceiling to floor, filled with glass globes. I approach the globes, organized neatly on shelves, in some sort of catalogue. Careful inspection reveals that the glass encasements contain memories. Reminiscence most private and also ones favorably shared. I see my 6th birthday party, when my Aunt gave me the glittery rainbow butterfly t shirt, and our trip to the park when I skinned my knee. I see me defending my sister from the top of the metal slide as a set of bullies taunts us from below. I continue down the shelves and come upon a globe of my first day at a new school, next to it, the day I got the stomach flu and threw up on my desk. Further along my goodbyes to my best 3rd grade friends, as I prepared for yet another new school.

The glass encasements continue and each memory is increasingly removed from its predecessor. I am on the steps of my first apartment complex, crying for the loss of a favored necklace from a late dear relative. At the graduation that would have been my own, staring into the faces of those I once knew well, but have grown distant. To a sterile room with desks and nervous young BFA hopefuls. In a tiny attic room reorganizing new purchases, and musing over the train ride, the bridge and the damp smell around us. In the side chapel of a church centuries old: to encounter a glass coffin, where a withered knight lays adorned with strings of delicate flowers, where I lost my breath once.

They come in much quicker succession. A successful snow dance. A silly movie with friends. A snowball fight with children much younger than myself on the way to school. Hiding out in a shed for one cold night. The view from the top of a mountain. In a tree house watching a meteor shower.

The hallway is seemingly endless, I cannot anticipate its contents.

Three globes that stand out near each other contain a sunny day on a swing set with Popsicles, A rare opportunity, and a giant tree dressed up like a monster. Not too far past them is a summer vacation; The Climax to a novel.

Not every glass holds a treasure, some are moments of boredom, and others I won't speak of for fear of tears. As I look upon the memories, each is a homage to the persons invloved, a private time, or at the very least a celebration for the brevity of that moment.



Distillation Series: Thomas Doyle, Escape/Scatter (2006).

Close up:
"Like black boxes bobbing in the flotsam, these works wait for discovery, each an indelible record of human memory."