unfinished

(1)
It happened years ago, in another city. It was summer, she's sure of that, as the heat was standing in the street, dense and vivid, even in the late evening. They sat outside, her and a colleague, sipping another drink, basically to postpone the moment of having to step into the old hotel, into solid, temperature-filled space.

Maybe it was the heat that melted the line between being colleagues and being friends back then, she still isn't sure of it. All she knows is that at one point, they were miles beyond small talk.

"There's this concept",

her friend/colleague said, her eyes suddenly all clear and open.

"Or more something like a wish for life -
to never

(2)
The exhibition consisted of 560 photos from China, all placed in one room, sorted in four fields:

Existence
Relationship
Desire
Time.

She went there on a tuesday afternoon, while the sky was a blurry white.

"Where is the starting point?" she asked the guard at the door to the one room.

"There is no starting point," the guard explained. "You can choose your own way."

So she did. Some of the photos were black and white, some coloured. Some were landscapes, some portraits. Some were intriguing, some were implausible. The one photo that touched her most was black and white, named "time - a leather raft on the yellow river". She wanted to take a photo of it, but in this room of photography, taking photos wasn't allowed. So she just wrote down the words, together with the titles of the four fields.

By the time she walked out of the one room again, the sky had turned to colour. On impulse, she tried a revolving door that belonged to the first floor. It lead to an inside square, then on to a stairway, and a balcony.

On the balcony, there was a chair, placed as if waiting for someone to visit it in the chill of this evening. Time is a sole chair in front of a blue sky, she

~

words: Dorothee Lang, Germany (blueprint21)
photo: Steve Wing, Florida (sand shadow)