the great expedition...

I remember what it felt like to have a kaleidoscope. I remember my thoughts when I looked through the kaleidoscope for the first time. I remember marveling at how fractured the world became. I wondered why it couldn’t be like that all the time. I remember the things that ceased to remain ordinary. I remember thinking that we must be blind to ignore these jewels hiding in plain sight. The glasses of water, the Barney duvet thrown across my bed, the shape and colour of my brother’s brow, the patterns hidden in the terrazzo floor. The images from my kaleidoscope are like the memories of my childhood. The broken pictures float around my mind, joined at the edges by a flawed hand. The sutures fray constantly, the memories themselves move in and out of focus. It’s like a multitude of television screens. The sort that wouldn’t be out of place when walking by an electrical goods store. Each television with it’s own memory playing repeatedly.

I remember losing my kaleidoscope. I remember the feeling of being in the presence of the mundane but lacking the special tool to make that which you thought was mundane extraordinary. I didn’t know that that was what it felt like to be heartbroken. I should have realised that love is like a kaleidoscope. It magnifies the ordinary, isolates the brilliance of the normal and multiplies it. It makes sure that you never forget that the dark spot on her lip was a Monet . One worthy of being hung in the hall of a Monarch. Without a kaleidoscope you forget that the precious moments are often the unremarkable ones. 

Is it so wrong that I should lead an expedition to find my kaleidoscope?

Happy Days,
Afam