[One can see] by Hannah Brooks-Motl


One can see now, years later, that I was living cinematically, or that all life is cinema, and this is both lucky and sad. 

Such a movement through popular space had not yet entirely displaced another, as my experience of popularity, then, had come in. 

It was beautiful to find the little opening and poke a finger through, as if I continued in a persistent drunkenness. 

This small triumph, attached to a larger house. 

Hanging down in the violet light, combining the feelings of one plus walnut, plus booty-short, plus promenade, and the radial fact of disclosure. 

Like the full, meaty taste of tea on the counter, or a vast leather couch, this was the town. 

The city before had been likewise inscrutable, poignant with all the so-so suffering of recantation. 

Here too in the grey machine of rain, the “we” who go up the garbage stairs, to behave. 

And vis à vis these eras, which mean nothing really, but a vague mood I have gleamed out of namesakes, or my thoughts about street cred, that value. 

How one related there functioned inversely with duration: staying on, I grew smaller in myself. 

But this conditional turn troubles me—I dislike its openness to litany, and my use for it. Things were thus. I would it

And how the incidents rise to claim my attention, from the drained streets and buildings, one’s actions visible only insofar as I can glimpse, through the thick surface, their alteration. 

So its statement grows stranger for being said, more than can be accounted for, and in fact I gradually learned to leave it behind, to demure. 

Sitting around until someone was finished to drive me home, then, to have a mini bottle of wine felt a great luxury, pouring it into the glass and drinking in the dining room. 

Such tactile nostalgia, like tangibility, can be a cause for great happiness, or a throes. 

It is undoubtedly the time it is, and you hold the year in. 

Helen, our manageress, had a sad old coat she’d insist she would replace, a daughter in London, an unhappy Italian at home.  

I have wanted to feel beauty like a leopard through the places we have lived. 

How rushing it comes, for every little scene.