The Journey Itself Is Home

It begins with Lovelock.

The stage is spare. A body enters, then another. Gesture arrives before character. An arm cuts across the space. A shoulder follows. Distance opens and closes without announcement. Costumes return altered, gathering another layer, then another. White gives way to colour so gradually that the change is noticed only after it has already happened.

Fabric begins to hold the light differently.

The stage thickens.

Not through numbers, but through accumulation. A sleeve catches movement that had belonged to a hand. Colour lingers after a dancer has crossed the space. By the end, the eye no longer separates costume from gesture. They have entered the same current.

Then The Journey Itself is Home.

The light could be sunrise.

Or the last light before evening.

It refuses certainty.

Across it, white moves through white. One dancer crosses another’s path and disappears into brightness before emerging elsewhere. A line almost forms, then loosens. A circle begins to gather, then opens before it can close. The stage keeps offering the possibility of shape, only to let it pass.

Nothing insists on becoming an image.

The eye slowly abandons the habit of waiting for one.

Sleep comes without much distance.

An old bedroom.

The room is already there before it is recognised. A bed. A doorway. Objects spread across the floor and along familiar surfaces. Not disorder. Simply things resting where they have come to rest.

There is a massage shift.

It has been waiting all day.

The hour has arrived.

A hand moves a pile of objects just far enough to make a space. It seems enough. Another object is touched, then left where it is. The room asks for nothing. Nothing prevents beginning.

Yet beginning does not gather.

The body remains standing among the objects as though another movement were expected to arrive of its own accord.

It does not.

Morning comes.

The room remains.

So does the hand resting lightly against the edge of the table, as though it had forgotten whether it had just finished something, or had not yet begun.

Notitia Health
Attention sometimes begins where completion falls away. Certain places ask nothing of us except that we remain long enough to notice what continues without resolution.