Curate, connect, and discover
However dramatic we make death out to be, really, a human death is quite easy. Your heart stops. Once. One kind of death for everyone.
Have you ever seen a city die? It's not one death. It's uncountable. A tree so big you can't watch its fall. Like you can't watch the sun travel. There it is. You get distracted. Something flashes on your wall. You look out. It is gone.
A city's deaths are very varied. Some are gardens dying. Some gardens don't die, but really they do. Really, they're dead.
Some are wild trees dying. The ones we watered by mistake, or by a thread of benevolence. Strung through palms and generations, maybe. A collective nurturing, and every solitary splash thought it was alone. They die, until they become the kind of sticks who's snaps are anonymous. There is nothing here.
Some are people leaving. There are a lot of those. But if you watch people leave, you notice they were the ones who came in the first place. Not the ones who already were.
The ones who already were always are. They are the city. Killing an elephant takes rounds of lead to the heart. Still it takes hours untill it falls, days until it stops breathing. It's not easy, killing a dragon. Those that are must be killed differently. They do not leave. But you can make their home hostile to them. Twist and contort it until those that are have no place to be. They find a new spot, of course. A new city. Who's life blood they aren't.
A city dies a hundred deaths. Like watching someone assemble a puzzle, it's not dramatic enough to watch the process. Like sand falling. Suddenly the glass is empty.
The problem is the body. It's our symbol, vessel and object of death. Without it we don't recognise decay.
Death of a city is the rarest thing you'll see. The bigger, the less you see it. The most imposing, the less you'll watch. The more lights, the less you notice the void.
Because it's a lie. And when you notice. Finally notice,
all you see are the whisps; floating. No sound. Unwatched. No meaning in silence. Nothing. Pathetic in the way they outline whatever isn't there anymore.
Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.
No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.
Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.
Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago
And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.
The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.
I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.
Always just a few generations out of our reach.
See, I was wrong.
We do notice.