Everything happens in a second

Nothing happened. I embroidered it in the pocket of a pair of shorts I found in the trash in Barcelona exactly one year ago. Nothing happened. They weren’t my own words, somebody else said them to me. I only stored them. When you put your hand in that pocket you can feel the words. Nothing happened. I long for those words sometimes.

Late this morning my bus arrived in Amsterdam. Sixteen hours from Wroclaw to my former home. A more human way of travelling than flying. A feeling of being in it together, staring at the moon at the saddest places possible, gas stations next to the highway in the darkest hours of the night. Sharing food and drinks. Sharing stories.

In the belly of the bus two red suitcases with my name on it. A big one I had just collected from a small village in Poland, Sokolowsko, a place I fell in love with a year ago. A place where Krzysztof Kieslowski watched movies as a child, sitting on the roof of the cinema looking through a hole.
I didn’t remember exactly what was in the suitcase. But now I know. It is the oddest collection of things. Golden shoes acquired at an auction in a permaculture garden, the letters LO on the left toe and VE on the right toe, golden spikes on the heels of both of them. Felt nipples made by a Hungarian felt designer I wore during a performance for a festival in Sweden last year. Paper airplanes folded out of the poem "Air mail" by Tomas Tranströmer, I threw hundreds of them in the air on a slow journey through Europe. The script of Kieslowski’s Decalogue which I was reading on the Kieslowski square in Sokolowsko daily last summer, Virginia Woolf’s “A room of ones own”, the Catalan translation of a children’s book a Dutch friend wrote and gave to me. My dead father’s suit, waiting to be embroidered and worn again. A sweater with a damaged worn out heart reading “I love Barcelona”, found on the street there, the gaps in the heart repaired with golden thread. A small plate made by an artist friend with a bird and the words “blue skies heal”. A walking stick I used on two long walks. A pair of shorts that look similar to the ones I posted last year but have yellow cross stitching instead of pink. There is a different memory in that pocket but I don’t remember what it is. And these are just a few of the things in the suitcase.

The other suitcase is smaller. I carried it around for the last 2,5 weeks. First to Amsterdam, then from London to the south of England, back to London and to Wroclaw from there. By train and bus to Sokolowsko and back to Wroclaw. I was supposed to carry it on to be reunited with my colleagues on the border between Slovakia and Hungary where I was a Bridgeguard once and from there to an artist' gathering in a salt factory in Hallein, near Salzburg but the load got too heavy. And I don’t just mean the suitcases. They are just weight in kilos. And besides, the small one is light. Half of it is filled with 250 paper boats. I am not joking.

Too much has happened since last summer. Amazing things. Beautiful people. The number of countries I was in don’t fit on two hands. Residencies and exhibitions and lectures and workshops. Meetings and articles and in the middle of all of that an unplanned long walk that left a lot of traces, of which I cherish the good ones just as much as the bad ones. But I forgot some of the names of people I became friends with. I owe them stories. Memories. Attention. I need to remember their names.

My former apartment in Amsterdam, the place where I am still staying whenever I am in town, is shaking. Literally. The garden next to my garden has disappeared. When I left here two weeks ago it was still there. But the neighbour has died, his cats have gone, the shed is demolished and all the trees and plants are gone. The owner of the house must have been eagerly waiting for him to go. To remove all his traces and turn it into a fancy apartment. Two builders and a big machine are driving long metal piles in the soft Amsterdam soil to build a foundation for an extension to the house.
I make coffee. I heat up some milk. I forget all about it. Another pan burned. Some things never change.

The bird clock on the wall in-between the kitchen and the living room is ticking but the hands don’t move, only the one for the seconds. It is stuck in-between the 32d and 33d second, 11.32. Everything happens in a second.