I collect odd things.
No. That’s not right. I collect ephemeral, liminal things and interesting curiosities.
A dried (probably cursed) pomegranate in a small birdcage. Several souls, carefully bottled and labeled after washing, stored in a velvet-lined box. Flowers painted in moonlight. Somewhere around there’s a star, wrapped in a scrap of silk. Threads of rose and nettle. Ghosts, moth dreams, roadside gods…you get the idea.
I also collect unusual humans…a mixed media painter who makes amazing abstract art in soap; a soapmaker and herbalist who also creates beautiful jewelry and wall art out of wire and found objects; a professional muse…
Sometimes, I even collect places. An empty rest area in Maine at 2:15 in the morning in late October. A chimney with no house deep in the woods in mid-March. A parking lot antique shop of abandoned amusement park paraphernalia run by retired carnies, only open when the stars are right.
I don’t know what to do with this, to be honest. I suspect that, in a different world, I’d have a table or shop tucked away in a corner of a bazaar or open-air market where I’d trade a story or curiosity for a coin or two, or have a little travelling wagon that would appear or disappear with the seasons for the same.
My little curiosities and ephemerals have a harder time in a world that has certain…
expectations
of how Things Are Supposed To Work and it doesn’t like strange little collectors and purveyors of art and other oddities like me. We are messy and don’t fit into neat little boxes.
Still, I collect my curiosities, my cursed fruit and weird little monsters, and someday, hopefully, I’ll figure out how to share them the way that they need to be.
(I’ve been reexamining what had been October’s Market and wondering if I can get it back to what it was supposed to be, as it got very much lost in the weeds trying to figure out how to make it something that could exist in the “Real World”, and in the process forgot what it actually was. The fact that we live in a capitalist hellscape that makes it exceptionally difficult to do what I want to do with it doesn’t help, and I need to find a way around that without losing it’s heart again. I desperately miss my Market.)