Beneath My Surface
Performance by Dalia Jacobs
I enter ringing a bell—a call, a transition, a signal that something is about to unfold. This is not rehearsed. It is an experience, a confrontation with grief that does not end.
The soil is lowered slowly. I watch it fall, feel its weight before it even touches the ground. Soil is memory, soil is home, soil is what is carried and what is lost. I sit on the fabric that once held it together and speak. The words come like echoes, fragments of something unfinished.
Leena’s voice fills the space, reading her poem. Her words hold what mine cannot. The scent of rosemary rises, sharp and familiar, a reminder of places I cannot return to. I lie down. A red thread is wrapped around me—deliberate, careful. It binds and connects, holds and restricts. There is no clear separation between comfort and constraint.
Eventually, the thread loosens. I untie myself, hands moving through the weight of absence. Rosemary is given away, carried off like a memory pressed into skin. Grief does not end. It lingers, shifts, takes new shapes. It is not meant to be resolved—only lived with.
Poetry: Leena Aboutaleb (Inheritance, Of a Coming World, Self-Portraits of the girl you love)
Documentation: Cecilia Labaadi