“I agree that all items I take from The Swap Shop are for my own personal use and that I will not use any item for financial gain. I will provide my signature to that effect upon receipt.”
The Swap Shop holds furniture, clothing, books and general lost-and-found - all available for claim and re-use. Things filtered down for retirement or sabbatical, reassignment, convalescence or palliative pause; a limbo space for objects between jobs, it’s a deathbed as much as a chrysalis.
The souls of the Asphodel Meadows flit like shadows, between Elysium fields and earth, between rebirth and afterlife, pungent with time and touch. The interval between the multiple lives of things is as slight as a flower petal, a knife’s blade perfumed with past blooms. Like the tentacled, immortal Hydra, each life holds past intimacies, staining and fertilizing the next. In this temporal holding space, might it be possible to be more mortal?