One day I left all the lights on in my bedroom & closed it off. Boarded up my windows & stuffed a towel in the jamb of the door. I waited downstairs for hours & hours while the light poured from every ceiling fixture & lamp, while the pressure built up. The camera I left inside recorded the moment the bookshelf lifted from the floor & disgorged its contents into the rising tide. Recorded the moment my bed began to float. When my bedroom door started to creak like a crippled animal pinned under a hunter’s boot, I knew it was time to abandon the apartment. I watched, from a safe distance, the boarded windows bursting open with halogen cascades, watched the front door surrender its hinges & fall beneath a flood of light & my possessions. Everything I owned flushed out through the windows & doors, piling into the parking lot—a flotsam of broken furniture, splayed paperbacks, scattered clothes, & ruined kitchen appliances. & what about the light? It lingered in pools of runoff until nightfall, when what didn’t escape to the wide, wild dark above drained down into the unseen underside of this narrow place we call the surface.
