VANTABLACK™

Writing, for me, is walking into a windowless room painted with Vantablack™, the deepest black, the black of nothingness, and trying to sense heat signatures in the dark and move towards them, towards life which exhales and radiates and vibrates in a way I can sense even in the dark. I don’t know what it looks like until I reach out and read it with my hands, stroke it, squeeze it, get a feeling for its shape and composition and heartbeat. Sometimes I move towards a heat signature and am left in the breeze of its evasion and scent of its pheromones. That’s okay. Perhaps we weren’t meant to meet today, but we will on another, when circumstances are right.

There are innumerable entities that live in the Vantablack™. It is an ecosystem. I am its guest. I am welcome as long as I don’t move too fast, grasp too clumsily, or cause intentional harm. I’m not allowed to trap or hunt what lives there; to do so is callous, disrespectful, big colonizer energy, and such actions are not rewarded. Sometimes I have to sit in one place for hours with sunflower seeds in an open palm before warm furry little critters trust me enough to approach, climb into my hand, crack the seeds open with their teeth, and tell me their secrets.

Vantablack™ rejects expectations. You must be prepared to take what it gives you even if it’s not what you were wanting or hoping for, because Vantablack™ has a way of giving you gifts beyond the realm of your imagination if you enter with openness and as few preconceptions and as little entitlement as possible.

It strikes me that whatever this is with you feels like the same process or adventure. I’m circling your heat signature in the darkest room, getting closer. I’m reaching out and feeling all your surfaces and you are reaching out and reading me back. I’m letting it unfold without expectations and being grateful for what I’m given, not trying to trap a feeling in a jar. I’m letting whatever happens in the darkest room stay in the darkest room and carrying it around with me in the bright outside like the most delicious secret.

So let’s play these games—I know losing to you will taste just as sweet. Let’s hold each other back and push each other out past pre-existing boundaries, out in the deep end. Let’s be other people, but mostly ourselves.

Let’s fuck in Vantablack™.