STAGGERING HEIGHTS
Take a spiral road to nowhere (all roads lead to nowhere). Discover time means you ARE nothing.
I’msitting here today, testing the resistance to disappear.
Against all logic, I woke up today and continued where I left things yesterday. I searched for the same contacts on my phone and reached out again. The same thoughts that gave me fear yesterday give me the same fear today. If I could have taken a pencil this morning, without a doubt my drawing would have started in exactly the same way it always starts: a curve that appears to be closing in sharply but then, before fully sealing into a bulb, reopens (they call this a neck); two small parallel strokes, aligned as the only visible dots of a dotted line circling the bulb like the moon circles this planet; at the center of this shape, a hint of a nose, as if someone had
very lightly pinched a half-solid, rotten pear… a slash underneath that, a settled, quiet cut that is not quite an opening yet, the mouthof…
I really have this dream of being shot into the sky. Nothing and no one around me or in sight. Darkness and total silence. The rush of that minuscule instant of freedom, just before it turns into an unfathomable panic, and tears, and thoughts of my mum and dad. That’s me, nothing but that dream transforming into that fear.
One day, I saw someone say in a video a phrase I immediately knew I was going to steal. Now, with all the years that have passed, I count it as my own: thinking—making art—is just connecting two dots that weren’t connected before.
–Rodrigo Hernández, April 2026
