7/20/21
Caroline Ouellette
The mechanization of movements and words creates a thrilling friction for you, that for me, feels like running a hand up a cat’s back from tail to skull. My heart sinks very low and I begin to think in code. You did that, but not this, went there but not here. And I hate it. The only magic in the world, bastardized and squashed. Reduced to petty paranoia and bean counting. But it's not a big deal. It really isn't. This is freedom. This is the world... Don’t you love it? Don’t you love to have FUN? Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun...
I posted this transposed over a picture of a dead rat on the beach. You liked it. It felt better than doing drugs. Time passes as I continue to hold you. At first firmly, then frantically. I’m clawing at you now, clipping your wings with my doors, making you muddy and heavy and still. All I need is all you have.
You tell me to tell you a story, so I do. You tell me to sing you a song, so I do. I contain many reflective surfaces and trap doors, and a beautiful cavity.
Living vicariously, vegetatively, and discovering the many ways in which consciousness can be mimicked.
About a month later, you ripped out of me in the front seat of your Tacoma and I made some kind of guttural noise that should never be made by anyone. I looked up at God.
As you flowed out, I felt a contraction, then a vacuum, that inhaled the world around me. I could, for the first time, feel the future, and the speed of myself moving toward it.
Slowly, I became.
Last night you put your finger in my drink to fish out a plastic monkey.
Yet another way to say “I was here.”
Caroline Ouellette is a Chinese French-Canadian artist, model, psychoanalyst, and addictions lab research coordinator from the great American void of Nebraska.
Born into a family of scientists, she went on to fulfill her default programming, studying psychology and anthropology at UCLA. Her work is interested in the cautious investigation of people, relationships, and consciousness as it oscillates from deeply felt to utterly alien.