Joel Holub

In the unlit corner of the room where I stand, the yellow walls appear dark brown-like old dry blood. Staring into this space the darkness becomes pixilated. Flecks of green and blue light switch places on my retina. Colors dance with the saccades of my eye.

Moving my head slightly to the right, the darkness melts into the corona of warm tungsten light from the lamp on the bed stand. In shadowy valleys and highlighted peaks, the textile landscape of the bed sheet stretches out. An uninhabited world charted out by a printed grid pattern, as if to note it’s present frozen undulations.

The lamp is a beacon, a lighthouse, a sun rising at the horizon of this bed world. A pyramidal black fabric shade hovers over a shiny black ceramic body. The lamp gives the impression of an obelisk glowing from within. It is the center of this silent and stillroom.

Beside the lamp on the bed stand top is a clock. It is turned to the side and I can not see the time. There is a faint green reflection on the blonde wood surface the clock rests upon. My eyes look for a fluctuation that might indicate the glowing numbers have changed, but none occurs.

My gaze descends past the slightly open stand draw, down to the floor. Glinting in the light is a large glass jar that is full of pennies. The warm copper coins wait to amass value. Thoughts of the jar’s weight repel my stare off to a section of floor by the bed. There just before the darkness of the bed’s underside, lay a ball of dust.

Suspended inside the grey wisp of dust are tiny particles of matter. Delicately unraveling from within the dust ball’s universe is a long single strand of hair. The chestnut colored hair has an unmistakable provenance.  Of all the things present and not present in this room, the hair leads me to an absence, and that absence fills me with longing.