Girl with a Liminal String
Monologue #03: Tinnitus of the soul.
She floats in the quiet between transmissions. She isn’t sending or receiving. She’s paused, held in the signal’s breath. The visor obscures the face, but not the feeling. Her opacity is what makes her feel so known. Something vibrates in her that hasn’t found language yet. She’s tuned to the quiet frequency, thinking deeply in the way that doesn’t need sound. And I know what she’s thinking.
Grief tethers one to the past, a link to memories of a long-ago present. Spacetime. Space and time. The portrait exists in that fold, suspended between recognition and reinvention. The identity inside the helmet feels unresolved, floating there in this half-lit chamber of pre-definition. I sometimes feel like I’m existing in an opaque reality that’s incomprehensible to others, where even the act of naming the self becomes another form of drift. A search that doesn’t end. A hum that never goes quiet.
And he’s always there. In the liminal spaces of the painting. In the parts that hover behind the color. In the negative space that forms the shape of longing. Threaded through the quiet. Curled behind the visor. Looped in the cable that arcs like a thought that hasn’t finished arriving. The string vibrates. The tether holds.