Chris Rusak’s AEOOJ(LMB) smells like static. It smells like blackbird song.

It feels like that sticky patch of time when reality is happening somewhere else. The pause just before everything changes. The flickering moment where you might slip between possible lives.

It’s a little uncanny to be surrounded by this perfume now, because as I sit in lockdown and stitch a series of pieces about inhabiting an interrupted body and its accumulation of pauses and scars, I’ve been deliberately remembering. AEOOJ unleashed a cascade of details.

It smells like the sensation of sweat on the back of your knees in a hospital bed with plastic under the sheet, the scorched cleanliness of the cotton blanket in a shaft of sunlight you can’t move away from. The twice-daily application of industrial solvents to clean the vinyl floor. Of damp cotton wool and skin enclosed by a plaster cast through a hot childhood summer. Of just dug-over flower beds. Of the shiny tape binding bandages to skin, and fingerpaint on sugar paper. It smells of dreaming of walking in arid places you’ve never seen. Of hedge-hidden cars going to places that you can’t reach. Of the transition when the warmth fades out of the evening, and the grass becomes damp.

It’s beautiful, and a little uncomfortable, and reassuring.

There was a grand procession every day of the summer I would turn twenty-two: one nurse pushing my bed, one holding the weights of my traction so they didn’t lurch painfully, another walking ahead to open the big glass doors between the ward and the hospital garden.

They would park me in the shade of a wide-canopied tree–dense enough to keep off light rain–and I’d snooze when the painkillers worked, or smoke and read, and play cards on the expanse of bedlinen if one of the nurses joined me on their break.

I listened to the blackbird that sat above me. I couldn’t not. It sang all damn day, and I was out there until the next shift change. Blackbird song is one of the most purely joyful sounds on the planet, it cuts through everything and rises beyond hope.

Me, the blackbird, the fuzzing roar of unseen cars.
Static. Waiting for life to start again.

Originally posted 19 May 2020