Artist Statement
Ellen loves lavender kombucha and little rays of sunshine.
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Constant Dissonance
april 6th 2020 and may 27th 2020
by Ellen Murray
When I wake up, after a while I open my curtains to find the sun's bright light. The yellow hits me with confusion. I expected the night. Forever darkness grimly accompanying all of this doom.
How are you today. I'm not sure why you ask. How should I be? How could I be anything except.
Except the air smells like flowers. A strange sweetness I have not known. Everything is green and the birds sing their morning delight. So much so that I, even when I close my eyes, feel a bit yellow myself.
Tentative photosynthesis.
Until tendrils of dread weave through the raining sunlight and snake themselves around my throat as if to eternalize this moment of breathless trepidation that marks my nightly dreams and waking nightmares.
Everyone exists approximately six feet apart. In a strange silence of an uncanny dream. Or they smile and say how are you in a jovial display of neighborly trust.
How should I be?
I can see you but only in rectangles and squares, a geometric reconstitution of what it means to love. Step two feet to your right, and you're no longer there. You never were.
Little children play baseball and the grass still gets cut so the air smells green and fresh. Dogs wag their tails and squirrels make more noise than they ought to.
Little flowers bloom and families laugh so the air is never quite silent. The wind rustles through the trees and the sun triumphantly proclaims its feat of living.
This reality is too beautiful for the truth.
So even my own reality, the air that wraps around my body, is out of step with my truth, and the air's lightness makes quick shackles around my skin.
There's a constant dissonance between this rite of spring and the terrible expectation of death.