attachments: after the artist residency

Spread out on the floor of my living room, or rather— the portion of the living room scraped together into a studio—lie the little pieces of residency.

There is more, of course, that I’ve taken with me, but these objects are the smallest while still managing to take up so much room.

It took me a few days after flying home to look at them all, the wound of separation still fresh.

That there was a wound at all was not something I could have expected or known.

Because while the setting of a little village in the French countryside, the vision of a chateau on a hillside, and the expanse of three weeks only for art each would have been breath-taking by themselves, it was the community of artists ultimately that devastated me the most to say goodbye to.

To speak the full truth, the depth of feeling to describe what it was like to live among and work beside our cohort from the 18th of February to the 10th of March is difficult. 

It wasn’t as simple as a vacation, a retreat, a ~summer camp~ for artists. It was as necessary as breathing, as natural as walking. To spend those three weeks making in community was to glimpse a world where artists lived at the center. Not at margins, in stolen hours before or after a day job, not among the tropes of the starving artist or the society outsider.

Inevitable. Beloved.

To return, then, was to cling to whatever from that time I could. 

To stutter for words when asked—how was it—

Because it was everything.

It was a religion I will spend days ahead devoted to, my altar filled with poems, notes written onto corners of paper, a playlist, a polaroid. 

The ridged lines of plain-quality printer ink with which I committed my photographs to paper have become more precious than any archival print I make now could. 

Because those pages were the ones fanned across the floor of the entry hall at the base of a staircase, gazed on while around me creative loves worked, a writer’s critique in the other room, a painter friend wandering down the stairs and in her gaze making the work glow.

They are crinkled from traveling in a suitcase, curling from my studio wall, dog-eared, rippled, but I hold these attachments close. I hold them close and for a moment I can feel the misty air, the carpet at the base of the stairs. I hold them close, and so a part of me still lives in the place where I held other artists and was held with love in return.