Sonja Blom
Fire princess
A seahorse turning into an alligator turning into a giant on two feet turning into a human on four feet
an otter, diving, turning into a dolphin
turning into
a horse, running, turning into sparks
sparks to waves and foam.
There was a time when the world was an oyster and I didn’t have a knife, a time when it was a christmas
present I couldn’t open – but could look and admire, could shake and listen. My room was my shell, a
warm grotto in the infinite darkness, piercing it with a warm candlelight. I would sleep in my bed and in
my dreams I would dive into a dream and look at what the world could be like. From these times I
remember my body differently, without a touch a body is a different thing. You might forget it exists.
Each night just a thin silver string would keep me attached to it – I went and collected pearls and dropped
them on the string. Until this day I am grateful it did not snap. Until this day the pearls hang.
The moment right before I fall asleep I remember all the lights of all the cities I have ever visited and they
merge together to a beating monstrous heart, lava-made.
☓
Spider
Each morning I wake up and begin my practice: weaving a net. Dew gets caught and forms strings of
pearls. Through each the landscape reflects upside down. Sometimes I watch it like a film: eight drops for
eight eyes.
I remember the other days like this: a heavy body that weighs down on a mattress. A wish for difference
and then– a difference. These memories are now like watching the light of the moon underwater, stirring,
trembling, but muted, softened. I savor them, put them inside a box which I seal and throw to a certain
corner of my memory.
Now I balance with ease across my net, widening, gathering more space each day.
☓
Laconic youth
A room which is not a room but becomes a room because the people in it are connected by strings of fire
pearls: electricity passes through the brain circuit and ignites the heart. It is an astral projection, it is life
on another planet.
During the day I would sit by my computer and through my fingers emit the words to the screen: eat the
words you emit. To love is to feel hunger and how the words taste I will always remember. Awaiting a
letter wrapped into a blue light.
I long for this like one longs for a place or a body yet all it passed was my eye. Through the eye to the
heart, to the sacral chakra, to the pineal gland. To the tips of toes. How to miss a place that is a ribbon of
photographs and text to which your only relation is that it makes your heart flutter and think that
somewhere there is a place you belong to.
Somehow I think of that place within a tree trunk, drinking moist nectar, body liquids, and a warm bed
and someone tucking you in and kissing your forehead. Waking up in the morning and putting on an
amethyst dress and diving into the ocean bottom where your friends are already waiting. When you read a
book and it reads you back.
Somewhere there is a pit, a crater made by a meteorite, full of power lines that slither and kiss like snakes:
this is where we live.
Sonja Blom is an investigator of wor(l)ds, ½ of Kointähti IG @kointaehti.
Images by Genietta Varsi and sara blosseville. Many thanks to Taiteen edistämiskeskus (Taike) for supporting our feral series publication.