experimental writing

David's flat isn't a great place to relax. He is tired after the day. He is emotionally and physically tired after a long and tiring day which involved a lot of thinking about his methods as an artist. He thought a lot about the way he has developed over the years.

He thinks that he has not developed over the years.

David walks from one side of his modern kitchen to another and then he walks back to the other side.

He walks back and forth many times.

He is thinking about the past. These thoughts were provoked by his experiences on this day, with Susan, in the corner of the studio.

David moves into his bedroom. He lies down for a second. He lets his hand drop down beside the bed and then he hauls his whole body over the side of his bed so that he is lying on the floor. The floor is wooden.

He reaches under his bed and fumbles around for a while, trying to find something. He carries on fumbling. He can't find what he is looking for so he begins to crawl under his bed, head first. He thinks, 'God.'

It must be dusty under that bed. It never gets moved and nothing ever moves inside it.

After around twenty seconds of commitment David emerges from the bed. He is holding a tray of what look to be tiny cassette tapes. He moves around so that he is sitting with his back to the bed.

The tapes are all marked. They each have a date on them as well as a few words of description. The descriptions are things like, David and Norman on Women, David and Norman on Tourism, David and Norman on Beauty, etc. The descriptions are written in small, scratchy, black, upper-case handwriting. The tapes are carefully stored in historical order. The dates on the tapes are all over ten years old.

David looks through the tapes until he finds a tape that's description says 'David and Norman – Smoking'. He takes the tape out of the tray and ejects it from its container. There is a small voice recorder in David's bed side table which he puts the tape into.

David sits still at his desk and presses the play button on the voice recorder. The sound of almost silence plays from the small speakers of the recorder. It sounds like someone breathing out softly, forever.

David sits at the desk and removes a large cigar from his pocket. There is the sound of a lighter clicking into flame on the recording. David echoes the recorded action in real time. He smokes. He tries to breathe in and out very quietly so that he can hear the recording as clearly as possible. He wants to hear every tiny nuance and fold in the sound. He feels like a detective, pouring over case notes. Every now and then, he feels like he hears someone inhaling particularly ferociously and he feels happy. He feels like with the aid of this recording he can remember each individual breath and sucking in of smoke. He is thinking that he can remember exactly how it felt to breathe the smoke in on that particular day and how his body felt and where he was sitting in the hut and exactly what he could see from his eyes and the tiny subtle sounds he could hear with his ears. His memory of that time feels so utterly complete. He thinks that the memory of that time is the most important thing in his life. He thinks about Norman.