{"id":44763,"title":"Virtual Escapism","description":"Photography project by Matteo Delred Did you hear it? Not the absence of sound, no \u2013 but the absence of anything else. It crept in like a tide that wasn\u2019t really a tide, but a feeling \u2013 a pervasive loop of time that seemed to shrink, stretch, and loop again in a way that felt less like the natural passage of things and more like a sterilised waiting room. If I\u2019m honest, it felt like the worst kind of masked ball, the kind where you pretend to be participating, to be doing something, anything, and all the while you\u2019re dissolving into nothingness","content":"

petty idle hands,<\/p>

a revelation,<\/p>

a disaster,<\/p>

a text message.<\/p>

All three ring the same in the end.<\/p>

We live in delicious detritus,<\/p>

a laugh from the flat upstairs,<\/p>

disembodied and slightly too intimate.<\/p>

We respond best to micro-performances:<\/p>

thumbs on glass, brows arched more than asses.<\/p>

We cling to domestic rituals:<\/p>

a mug I like the shape of for coffee,<\/p>

watching you water our plants with gravitas,<\/p>

usually reserved for baptisms.<\/p>

But have they become our children?<\/p>

These things tether us, however lightly,<\/p>

so we can adjust, as people always do.<\/p>

We learnt to inhabit the intermission,<\/p>

the pause where nothing is demanded,<\/p>

except our presence, even while we did<\/p>

everything possible to distract ourselves<\/p>

from being in that past-present presence.<\/p>

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