'Dorm Room' by David Gruber at Trust, Vienna

orphan account
fall in vermont
 [four happy days before another moon]
[I have never been to vermont]

following the hillside or the arch, following you up and your feet, on the down low: we were together then, escaping the afternoon programme, high as a kythe on the fantasy of getting caught.

I seize the day by its elbow, and it blends us together: we clash. we fill the air to suffocating. likeable or not, once you drank it, it cannot be re-traced: not on the back of the frame, not on the insides of your wrists, not in the cups or the drawers, shelves crowded with layers upon layers of use, soluble, marks only if the light hits them right, all inactive users, still holding space for entirely unrelated people. 

the dormitory remembers us, as we once thought we were: singled out and secretly smoking on the rooftop, or out near the goalposts, warming hands, falling ass over teakettle, up there when we shouldn’t, outside of the sleep reserved time, passing on secret paths, now backlit before me, already romanticised then.

all things kept their faces

there is something eerie about it, washed out bluish hue of sleepless dawns, gathered curtain folds, and also dust rising in specks of sunlight, particles that belong to me as well as you, by which I mean a multitude of you, coming before me, and now, making a haze or a fuzz over the lens, like Vaseline, zeroing in on one thing while another got away, and remains without audience

you would have been my best friend back then, for lack of better judgement or worse, entering empty rooms, images of young boys ebbing and flowing in through the times, whether we go with the grain or against it, we´re swayed. 

dry eyes burning from the last dose of reality, trying to earn a living but too exhausted, all those strange feelings have left us sore, like neck, shoulders, back. there was even one time when we drove a long way to meet someone who wasn’t actually there.

you swim into my field of vision, blurry and fatigued, the back of the ad, this light blue opacity, not quite looking and yet. we join the others in their scratchy discomfort.

we lie awake and dream their residual dreamscapes, trading licks, creating content. whenever I feel it's  time for a new game, I give the walls a talking.

it was one hell of a night.

— Sophie Stadler