by Toby Gui, 15
I. introduction to the show
i don’t think it’s right to start this with a litany of tragedies. i don’t think it’s right to show my life in all its whole and first display suffering arm to arm.
i don’t really know how to be vulnerable. not really, not without cauterizing my wounds and prettying them up until they’re nothing more than an idea of it, and i’m comfortable in that. i really, really dislike the idea of having to sum up my life in a single work. there is so much that goes into a single experience, let alone over a decade’s worth of living that i could not possibly sum up in one work no matter how lengthy. it does not do me justice to focus on what has made up most of my life, stuffy rooms and quiet nights hunched under the crevice in the cellar’s corner, not when i have so much i love. i am a collage of everyone who has ever met me, every work of media and thing (beautiful or not) i have ever come across. i think that’s something worth noting, worth being. to love in any regard is to let open the opportunity to change, leave a part of you to dwell in their heart’s deepest chamber and change for the better.
if you can find it in you, please forgive your author for his inability to concisely sum up his beliefs.
II. what does home mean to you?
and your house is too quiet
shouts and the pitter patter of feet pounding fill hollowed out floorboards, hallways gutted inside out jaw open stiff and blue at the fingers—it mocks you to live in a place of newly furrowed despair; what is it that makes you undeserving of what once was, what is it you’ve done to ruin it so?
truthfully, to word it with poignancy is doing it injustice. it’s a bellow from the deepest pits of my chest, in the tips of my fingers to my toe beds: i want to be loved. i miss my family. there is nothing to miss, and i know this, of course, but still i yearn with my whole body for the chance to love unapologetically and be loved back.
shout from rooftops and windowsills picked open; you will find no reprieve. there is no noah’s ark in a house flooded with grief for a third broken little boy in a body too big in a house too small
(6:01 pm
the refrigerator buzzes and you wonder why you cannot seem to ever be happy. maybe you are just not meant for it)
III. late july
i wonder if this is how it is to live. for the world to convulse for you, to feel the slow and stupid heartbeat of summer against the sleeves of your skin.
confront the meaningless of life as an opportunity for something wonderful; a maker of beauty soil rimmed palms and dirt caked under your nails, earth and you one in the same. sticking your hands in the dirt and running down grassy fields and find in others the beauty of relationship and human connection (i love to throw pebbles across the lake with you and i would wait forever for you if that’s what you needed the magpies keep me company at your doorstep and i love you so much and in another life i’d like if we could share an orange and fold laundry, peak through morning blinds and hurriedly shuffle back under covers)
it is enough to be here. look at yourself and say i want to live until it comes true, drag your hands through your hair until you feel real and know that longing is enough.
IV. closing to an empty theater from a tired author / stilted mountain side & listen close to the low hum and warbling of cicadas & songbirds’ chirps & they come in couplets & we are constantly splitting bread to one another & the west wind calls your name & it says what i dare not & the world loves you & you were
born to die but there is beauty in death & calloused hands & the squeaking of a rusted door hinge & you spend so much of your life trying to make yourself palatable & do you remember what you were meant to taste like &
living for the hope of it all is what it means to live & the body heals itself over and over again & you will rebuild in spite of it all & there is somebody who’s been trying to save you all along and it’s been you.
Manalapan, NJ
Bridge Ink 