by Eirini Kartsaki
Photo credit: PAR Residency, Buenos Aires, January 2026. Photo: Jonathan Reiccholz
Listening to the cicadas again today as a mode of survival. People go up and down, running with dogs, or alone. I hope I will make it. Writing is the only way through. It is the only way this desolate feeling can become something else.
In the summer, every movement, thought and action is punctuated by the cicadas. They are a constant reminder that I am alive. What is the structure that might hold me without the need to harden or break, without feeling lost or in need to be found? Is my insistent need for cock only replaced by apathy? Is there anything in between? When I eventually start living, I’ll remember to tell myself what it feels like.
A lot of parents tonight at the park. I am not one of them. I have decided that parenthood, as we well know, is not for me. I am waiting for a stranger to arrive at the first available bench.
I have a tendency to turn everything into sex, when in reality I need so much more. No one thing is enough. I am not really here to meditate. I am here waiting for cock. I am here wanting to be fucked, but quality time. Wanting to collapse against myself, against the need to fulfil all of my wishes.
Yayoi Kusama and Dolly Parton just died. Nothing seems certain anymore.
I wonder what the shape of grief is. What is the anchor that will prevent me from exiting my structure permanently.
I am waiting in the dark like a pervert. Someone says, the fight is 1-0. He arrives and I kiss him. No big plans for today.
I travel from mainland Greece to the North. The night has been eventful. I spend it with a Libyan man I have just met. We smoke weed and fuck.
It feels hard to remain consistent within this life structure, to find ways to hold on to visible things.
I fall in love with a Mexican man at a friend’s wedding. I set up home in Mexico City for a while, wash my few cutlery, arrange my clothes in piles. I make a fish stew from time to time. Something to hold on to, a concrete memory of things of the past. I only have summer clothes. But now the winter is here, and I need something for the rain. We intensely love each other for a while and then we end it. Six months pass and my grief is still palpable. I decide to meditate on it by sewing for thirty days.
I sit on the same chair for thirty days. My back hurts but my heart is full, because I am making something. I am using my hands to construct something small that I can later hold and say, this is what I made.
Making something with my hands, sewing every day, repeating this action again and again, this is the vocabulary of grief. I create soft sculptures that I hang from the ceiling. I buy pink felt and grey felt and burgundy. I sew small fingers and toes. Grief takes me apart. I am sewing myself back together.
I am looking for the structure that can contain a life that does not naturally want to be contained. I repeat actions as an anchor to hold me in place. Softness will have to be part of the equation if I am not to disappear.
In a way, I exist within the parameters of sewing. A simple action that can be executed with consistency and requires showing up. In grief, it is difficult to exist beyond those parameters. I can only wake up and complete a simple task. I am aware of my frailty, my neck aches, my eyelids are heavy.
I often function on the edges. Perhaps the edges are my mission.
In the edges, it is harder to pull things off. It is harder, because there is danger to be experienced. I have to put things in place, so that the fall is soft. You know, blankets and soft furnishings under the tightrope.
Listening to the cicadas again, as a kind of chant, a system of knowing.
No one thing is enough. Looking into the days to come, I list the things I can hold on to: watercolours, favourite t-shirt, my notes. I list the emotions that function as bookmarks: first coffee on a Saturday morning watching some trashy TV, writing a few lines down, undoing something, holding on to obscurity but wanting it to have a precise language. I kissed again last night, by the sea, and then the moon came out.
No one thing is enough. But these bookmarks might just hold me afloat. Writing is a buoy, a way of surviving the sorrow, swimming through the grief, floating.
I was waiting for the lives to appear, but they never did. My forehead is as straight as a monkey’s ass. Now the question becomes, how to sustain this kind of life without being needy or over-giving? Even a small thing will do. Some potatoes, piece of fish. I guess the question now is what to do so I stop the pendulum. I will make my brujería not just for others, but for myself too.[1]
I will exorcise my demons differently, avoid going platinum blonde or getting an obscure tattoo. Some changes require bigger shifts. They hold me in suspense. I have no idea what this animal will end up being. But for once, I will keep my eyes open to see the slight shifts. And when it will have a mouth, I hope it tells me its name.
[1] I always forget that writing is translucent. It goes through this page and the next, refusing to be contained.
Eirini Kartsaki is a performance practitioner, writer, and lecturer. She is the author of Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces (Palgrave 2017) and editor of Obsessions of a Showwoman: The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky (2024). Her research comprises work around contemporary performance, live art, and feminist practice. Kartsaki has written extensively on repetition, desire, and pleasure in performance. She is currently working on her second monograph Theatres of the Weird (MUP).
1 Comment