Pants Labyrinth

Look at the city. I had a thought that this place was a show. A maze. A disorganized museum of countless apartments, countless lives, stacked up on top of each other. I had a thought that every person living here unknowingly collaborates on a great work of art. They live in a museum, and they are all the customers. But they are also the artists, and the art too.

Someone started the museum a long time ago, but they were never able to finish. So the babies were taught how to live too, and they all grew up to be artists because that’s all anybody can do.

Using Laundry

And this is how they do it: they show each other their laundry. The clotheslines are where the private lives are thrown out the window and dangled out in the world. Floating above the streets, hung up to dry, flaunted from a wire by the window, flying like prayer flags or banners. Exposed and in the wind, is the evidence of a thousand lives and more, countless homes, families, experiences. Dirty, sweaty, sloppy people just like everyone you’ve ever met. They come home each day and take off their clothes, throw them in a pile with their other memories. And then all those grimy things get tossed in the wash together, and once sufficiently jumbled, exposed for the rest of the world to see. Little glimpses of each life.

I was looking up and I had a thought about living somewhere else, in a different country or city, in a stranger’s apartment, in someone else’s clothes. A place is more than it’s history, the real story is living and breathing and walking around a getting dirty and then getting naked and then doing it all over again every day. And the proof is hanging from the buildings right now, drying.