I have blue photographs at my fingertips.

I’ve been collecting these diluted images of eternal cities in a murderous heat.
The temperature in my bedroom is about 40 degrees. I have not slept at all, and I’m about to kill everybody.

I hate how, when you’re sleep-deprived, the familiar comes back in unfamiliar forms:
everything flickers and vibrates and begins to exist on this threshold of defamiliarization.
It doesn’t help that the city is bathed in this hot white sunlight that overwrites everything,
and as I walk and walk, I become threshold without a map.

Suddenly, I find myself in another century.
I document myself in different stages of dissolving.

The light breaks down all the images around me.
It is a light so strong that it is able to reverse images, to reveal the inner workings of the world.
And the more I see and collect of them, the more it appears to me
that the center of these pictures is something outside of what we know as visual.

Rome in August. Death city.

Forensic investigation skills would be quite helpful in navigating this architectural palimpsest.
Part ruins, part hallucination, part theme park.
I could just sit for hours in the shade of this historical building from whatever time BC,
contemplating the act of collapsing such distances.

I have blue images at my fingertips.
Images that lift and float, and spread themselves without being desired by anyone.
Images that make decay tangible —
that break down the material, the temporal, the perceptual invisibilities of this world.

They are second-hand images.
Nobody wants them.

But honestly, what does any of this matter?
Where the fuck am I?
Why the hell send home this postcard, why bring back this souvenir?

Simply to reassure myself that I was here?
To anchor me in time and space when I take a beer from the fucking fridge,
reminiscing about the Eternal City in about a month or so?

Earlier this morning, waiting in line at a museum,
I heard a father tell his son that in life, he had to make the important decision between history and geography.

Frankly, I haven’t heard anything so stupid in a long time.
And it is only now, reconstructing this memory,
that I realize my outrage was about someone who promotes the idea
that this world could be so neatly categorized.

Pardon my slippages.
This must be my tiredness.

It’s 42 degrees.
I feel like an elastic rubber band stretched to its limits.
The thought occurs to me that perhaps I could now reach different points in time.

That’s why I’ve always been drawn to archaeology;
to liminal spaces where time and place destabilize.
To a practice of contemplating objects and the way they re-enter time.
The reappearance, the repetition of gestures —
the act of looking across temporal and spatial distances.

Observation is a practiced skill, something inherently physical.
A form of attentive seeing that I deeply admire.

You are entangled in this constant confrontation with the vulnerability of the present.
And at some point, you befriend these unstable conditions.
You develop a relationship with the materiality of the world.
Which is, after all, a relationship you have with yourself.

And yet I stand here, with my withdrawn hands,
and I am looking at the Colosseum,
and I understand nothing.

These numbed-out Roman ruins remain inaccessible to me.
But a blue eternal city sits at my fingertips.

Its geography? Speculative.
Its history? Magnificent.

I move my body in slow motion through the gazing crowds.
We move forward toward the exit in an almost choreographic act —
slowly, self-dismantling in this steel-pounding heat
that radiates from these multi-temporal walls.

Time stretches and loops back on itself.
On some days it appears to me that there is something around me, like an invisible envelope.
On some days it occurs to me that perhaps I have already reached the limits of my perception.