“My crush is like a squashed peach on sun baked tarmac, all squishy and exposed. My daydreams are all lilac skies and lost highways. My thoughts are all open road. All of my summer dresses are lined up with their backs to the wardrobe. I sleep in my suitcase, my arms and legs are folded, ready, waiting. I close my eyes and a world unravels. The house lifts up, rotates and spins away from the ground falling deep into a passing cyclone and I am gone. I am falling like a peach and I hit the road. I am on the road, a kind of clementine brick road and all I can hear around the blurred edges of this scene are lines from ‘Gyspy’ by Fleetwood Mac.
If time is like a Möbiusstrip then maybe an album can be a place and a country singer can be a colour. There are no hard limits in dreams. All of your heart’s desires are laid bare, like a dream within a dream.
I tumble down a well. I fall deep into a long night out of time, all out of kilter with what is real and what is waiting to happen.
I wake up behind the wheel of my 1967 Chevy Impala, sprayed Johnny Cash Black, all leopard print interior. The engine sounds like the opening chords of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ when you start her up. Hitched to the back bar is my 1964 Bambi Airstream Wanderer. We roll out. We ride along the highway, taking in still blue skies and desert air. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know where we’re going but we know that we’re on vacation, this feels like a long weekend. All sense of time and reason fall behind us, we adjust the rearview mirror so that we can see the weight of our ties to reality disappear.
When the Chevy goes over 60mph she’s all ‘Kashmir’ chords and rifts below the bonnet, it’s soothing and we unwind, the car and I, we are on the road. A kind of dusty orange road, and all I can hear is ‘Whole Lotta Love’ coming out of the radio or the engine, or both.
We drop anchor at Beth Orton’s ‘Trailer Park’. I think the trailer park is haunted so we will only stay one night. I lie on the roof of the Bambi and watch the Perseids fall through the night sky, diving through the Northern lights, casting wishes on all of the pretty shooting stars. After the meteorite show and the air has cooled, I find my soapy scented bathwater crumpled ten year old copy of Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ and make snow angels across the pages before sleep.
The sun surprises my eyelids open. The car and the trailer are parked in a garage, somewhere in another town somewhere I have never been. I drove all night and my limbs are heavy. What moves me out of the room and into the waking, working world is the memory of being on the road, away from all of this. I was absent, lost and gone along an unknown highway all night. All of my summer dresses are waiting to be taken, I know they feel the same as I do about now. I have a crush on abandoning all off this and taking off, with a kitsch and vintage trailer in tow. I will leave town one day and this is how I’ll go. This is what keeps me awake at work. However squished and squashed the waking world throws this, this dream is all that I know.”
(Gallery Magazine Guernsey, December 2012)
The Bardo Retreat 