The thing at the time was ugly and banal barely even worth mentioning but looking back now it is imbued by some magic of memory, context I guess, the slow accumulation of other memories stacked on top or scattered around it, not everything is worth remembering, and most things are completely forgotten but like a piece of glass on the beach some things come back to cut you open and you bleed right in front of yourself when you're stuck in traffic or stuck in an airless waiting room alone or stuck at a gathering among acquaintances nodding in time with the conversations but your mind is skipping, heart constricting, tiny irreducible details riffling through you like the scuttering of an old projector showing a silent film, independently produced and never intended for public consumption, of tiny seemingly unconnected scenes; a patch of rain slick sidewalk, a parrot in a cage, a cocaine dusted CD case, hands connecting on a sweat soaked pillow, a torn note, your reflection in a public bathroom mirror, the graffiti on the wall behind you rubbed indistinct by over the counter solvents and wage slave indifference, you're in a train station, bus station maybe, some vestibule in a building designed for public conveyance, so you leave the gathering or waiting room, the fluorescent temple of utility, and exit into the city, and there it is empty space occupied by people, concrete and glass, an invisible fog of chemicals, a collage of sound and smell, the the lurching agony of that scene in your mind, like a sheet on a clothesline - another memory torn from your youth - that you once mistook for a ghost. | image Sarah Lucas - New Museum.