The Weight of Unspoken Lines
It is 3:14 am. The house is holding its breath, and I am staring at the dust motes dancing in the sliver of moonlight that cuts across my desk. We spend our lives building structures out of expectations, stacking them like heavy books we never intend to read. We are told that if we follow the sequence, if we keep the edges aligned, the chaos will stay outside. But the chaos is already inside. It is in the way we hold our breath when we are angry, or the way we apologize for taking up space. We are taught to be rigid, to be predictable, to be the architecture of someone else’s design. Yet, in the dark, the walls feel thin. The rules we follow are just ghosts of habits we inherited from people who were just as lost as we are. If I stopped following the lines, would I fall, or would I finally be able to see the floor? The morning will come, but it will not tell me who I am supposed to be.
Kirsten Bruening has captured this tension in her work titled Rules of Life. It is a quiet study of the boundaries we build and the fragility of the order we cling to. Does looking at it make you feel more anchored, or does it make you want to break something?
