عُـلا’s Reviews > War of the Foxes > Status Update

"All this was prepared for me. All this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else’s future. I stayed as long as I could, he said. Now look at the moon."

"It is too heavy, says the canvas. You lack restraint. I was sleeping in whiteness, drifts of snow, and you woke me and told me your dream, my blank face upturned, listening. You came to me while we were sleeping, we were both sleeping, and you asked me to hold this for you. I am holding this for you."

"Put yourself in the painting: you are responsible. Broadcast from a smeary place: you are responsible. Wearing your dead face, your man face, your real face: you are responsible."

"I lost the important parts and I set about restoring. Wanting to show and not being able."

"I stepped out so things could progress without me. The knot of the self: take it out. The knot of the self: what is the rope? The ability to nullify the self in favor of the landscape, or a lover, or a bowl of fruit. What happens when I no longer want to meet you?"

"Allegedly. When you paint an evil thing, do you invoke it or take away its power?"

"This is my hand over his face, which isn’t his face anymore, revising. I made a shape of the shape he made, subtracted what he shared with anyone else. There wasn’t much left but it felt like him, wild and scared. It was too much to bear. I put down the brush and looked at my hands."

"Inside himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you can live in? Why build a shed for your fears? The life of the body is a nightmare."

"He didn’t expect to be handed over, to be delivered. To be tricked into his own face. Anyone can paint a mask. It’s boring. And everyone secretly wants to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer version of the self. How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself."

"You can’t paint the inside of anything, so why would you try? Painting the inside of anything is dangerous. I imagined my wrists broken just enough to keep the feeling from crawling up my arm."