Cheirolimne

September 12, 2026

Matter is just slowed energy.

|| Room I - Water staircases ||

Every summer I visit the lake where you drowned.

I remember the light by its texture, not its color.

< Wall label: p̷e̶r̵m̷a̸n̶e̷n̵t work. Not for loan. Not restorable>
Condition: ███▒▒▒░̶░̶░̶

It takes everything.
Prolonged immersion.
The shoreline has never been moved by restoration.
I forgave you before you did it.

There's something obscene
in the staircase that keeps descending
through the trees,
toward a threshold
that opens onto black water.
The water is deeper from your room than it is from the lake bed.

Some frequencies become places you can never return to.

The house stood.
Nothing else did.

< Curator's note: architecture has no obligation to make sense 𝄏

Neither did you.

|| Room II ∅⌀⃠ Untitled Telephone ||

You always called me
in the middle of my favourite song.

Always.

You are not irrational.
You are a piece of software still running,
c̷o̵r̷r̶e̸c̷t
for a world that stopped existing.

I wish I had told you that.

I wish I had understood
that a machine can be correct
long after its purpose is gone.

You left no scar.
You left a blueprint.
I spent years mistaking its walls for my own.

I have been s̷o̶m̵e̷o̸n̶e̷ e̵l̶s̷e for 86401 seconds.
I know this ceiling from underneath the fall.
The scar healed before the wound learned to open.
Sometimes I can hear the shape of your room.

I mistook destruction for transcendence.
I think you did too.

|| Room III - The Attic <site-specific work, never open to the public> ||

The stripper sits on my lap.
Blood fills my nose.
I feel your hand at the side of my hair,
But it's just the paramedic trying to find where the entry wound is.

There is an attic somewhere in this house
that does not exist.

On display: one horrid thing:
The summer we were supposed to survive.

The house had no windows.
It still flooded.

I gave the water somewhere to go
I never gave you anywhere to leave.

Death and I are past intimacy.
We've settled down.
He works all day.
I never leave home.

I am afraid that if I open that door
everything will still be w̷a̶r̵m̸.

Hands in liquid asphalt.
I kneel. I drag you from the puddle.
I wait.
The glass closes over me.
The mirror keeps a version of you it never agreed to lose.

|| Room IV 𝄐 Residual Structure ||

The snow outside my window has your handwriting.
Winter renders every memory more visceral.
So I mistake your absence for evidence that I was never meant to recover.

I cry.

Not because I believe it will change anything.

But because the body sometimes continues
after the mind has exhausted its arguments.

Memory keeps a body count.

I was designed for impact, not the absence of it.

I have run so far without ever leaving home.
I have crossed rooms like countries.
And the suitcase remembers every destination I never left for.

I am raw concrete holding empty space.
Still waiting for the weight of your hands to justify the ruins.

I remember y̷o̶u̸r room from the wrong side of the wound.

There are staircases in the woods.
They still count the steps I didn't take.

Peace becomes something I feel guilty for having.
And that's the damage.

𝄆 Room V - Return ▒̷░̶▒⃤|l|l|l|l|l|

Every summer I return.

Because somewhere in this world
there should exist
a place where your absence
is still visible.

I sit beside the water.
I wait for the surface to go completely black.
My reflection gets out of the water before I do.

And for a moment
I can almost see you there

Staring at me
with the exhausted expression
of someone who has stopped waiting.

Then the wind moves.
The reflection breaks.

And I remember that you are dead.

The lake keeps the shape of a hand that never reached far enough.

|| Epilogue - Work on permanent loan ||

I keep the volume of my favourite song low enough to mistake it for your breathing.

If it sounds broken.
That's because it is.

The water still listens.
The lake still holds your shape.

And every miserable summer,
when I look into it,

for one impossible second,

I disappear too.