The daily meandering from one voice to another listening between the words to what isn’t obvious to them. A seek and find, a treasure hunt an archeological dig into areas they brush past, I linger there.  This is what I enjoy, finding the decayed, abandoned and often neglected gems that life circumstances pushed them to bury. Some days it feels like helping someone clean out an old closet. Tossing the items they grew tired of, impulse purchases that never were used, the items that are thin to the thread because they were worn most often and those forgotten pieces that accompanied an ideal or image of themselves they were too afraid to make public.  

It’s heavy on some days, the days when they linger over garments they wore during painful moments or damaged items they tried to piece together with some sort of adhesive rational. They toss it to me to examine.  I do. That’s my role, to examine and ask questions, until this place in them is almost clean. Clean enough to live the life they’ve wanted. Looking closer and asking questions about the narratives attached. 

I don’t always realize how much touching other’s things leaves residuals on me. I touch lots of people’s things all day. 

Intimate, dry, rough, cold, mildewed and even infested things all day searching

until we find them.