The Labyrinth Beneath Your Feet Alt Text

This sculptural book, a digital scan of a gouache and watercolor painting, encompasses three narrative threads. The text blocks are distributed along the endless hand-painted labyrinth, that loops in on itself. One thread is from the point of view of the Minotaur of Greek myth, Asterius, one is from the point of view of the artist, and one is a poem about long Covid. The three narrations intertwine across the work, conversing with each other, and differentiated by font and text color. Below, the narrative threads are separated for accessibility.

Thread One: The Poem

Instead of long covid
call it a labyrinth, which you,
bull-headed in your conviction
to live and let live,
have crafted into a home.
every winding wall painted
to catch every bit of light
that wanders in.

in the absence of a world
that will have you, marvel
at the one you created:

what some might call a cage
you call a practice. you circle out
and in, and at your center
you find yourself, your own
good company.

and when they do see your face -this mask that some
might call a portent
of all they wish to forget -
call it love.

squint at everyone above
your monstrous muzzle
so they can see you smiling
so they know
out of most everyone
in the room, you
will be the last one
to do them any harm.

Thread Two: The Minotaur

That first day
panic wore down to hopelessness
which might be another word
for acceptance.

In the absence of light
all I could do was feel,
and feel, and feel.

A wall. A wall. A wall. An opening.
A wall. An opening. A wall. A wall.
A wall. A wall.
A wall. A wall. A room.
A circle. An orbit. A practice.
A body. A home.

Hero: The idea that persists. The name that is remembered. The teller of the tale.

The experience of being and bearing
the punishment for anothers carelessness
is enough to make anyone monstrous.

I am the product of a man
who believed he deserved
everything he wanted.
My death will one day
be the same.

Something is in here
that wants to kill me.

I trace the red thread
along the halls a flash of fire
in the dark I have memorized.

My sister made this thread.
Betrayal never comes from your enemies.

The hero of this story has covered
these walls in red.

Despite my mother's best efforts
I knew my father's shame
from the way he would not
look me in the eye.

I remember the first day
I really saw myself,
sitting at the edge of
a palace fountain.

The buds of my horns.
My elongated snout.
The dark brown that
filled my eyes, lid to lid.
Those animal eyes.

It was at that fountain
that my mother would find me
shard of limestone in hand,
blood dripping down
from my shoulders, where bull
meets man.

I was so sure there would be
a normal human boy beneath.

Like a sculpture
in a block of marble,
perhaps I, too,
could be beautiful:

A prince the town could admire.
A son my father could love.

The scars have made my skin not unlike gnarled wood.
Despite my ugliness, I dared to venture
out into the streets in the early hours of dawn.

While Knossos slept, I would run my hands
over the brightly covered columns, the frescoes,
and admire the birds that gathered to peck
at leftover crumbs in the agora.

"If they see you, they will kill you"
my mother's words rang through my ears
whenever I ducked behind a column to avoid
any early morning passers-by.

I know they might kill me, and still
a part of me wants nothing more than to be seen.
A part of me wants someone, anyone
to just look at me.

I remember the night Mother took me out of the palace and into the sleeping streets.
As the constellations filled our eyes, her voice filled my head with stories of the gods and heroes.
"One day, they will try to take the night from you. The moon and the stars. Commit them to memory. They are as much yours as your name is, Asterius."

In death, my mother could not protect me from my father's ire. The way I reminded him of his mistakes. That is why he ensured that he and the people of Knossos would never have to think of me again.

I remember his words to my crying sister as I was being led away.

"We all must make sacrifices, Ariadne. The people of our city need to heal and forget. To return to normal. They don't need to continue being haunted with the knowledge of what wrathful gods can do."

The only ones who know me now are the unlucky few.
The Athenians who were sacrificed for the sake of their people.
Everyone thinks they're dead. Once you're deemed a sacrifice, no one cares what happens to you.
Eventually, we started to find each other. In the dark, my face was of little concern. In the light, I doubt it would phase them, these people who know what monstrosity looks like.
It looks like their friends and family averting their eyes.
A handful of Athenians each year is a small price to pay so the others might go on, unbothered.

One day, the hero will catch up with us. Either we will be face to face with his blade, or we will be tied up in the web he has infected these walls with.
We make do, this sad lot and I. Gods of our loneliness.
It isn't much, but for now, it is ours.

Thread Three: The Artist's Story

2021
I ended 2020 sick with the virus I tried so hard to avoid. Months pass, and new and unfamiliar pains continue to snake through my body.

2021
Time keeps passing. The doctor's tests turn up nothing, so I try to keep track of my symptoms. The pain. The exhaustion. Doing so makes the anxiety worse. The anxiety being worse makes the symptoms worse. So I try, instead, to ignore them.

If I don't give them attention, maybe they will go away. What choice is there but to hope?

2024
I look at my friends mouths when they speak and imagine a hallway of other mouths, doorways of lips and teeth opening and closing with words and breath. If you look into one mouth, there is another hallway of mouths, just as vast and unending, undulating with hundreds of thousands of breaths colliding.

My living room no longer feels like it's filled with three people, but hundreds, thousands.

Watercolor text that reads:
YOU SEE A ROOM OF UNMASKED PEOPLE, I SEE A HUNDRED GUNS SMILING PEARLY AS THEY SWEAR THEY AREN'T LOADED

The only mouth I can control is my own. It holds in its tight-lipped grasp the question

Is anywhere safe?

The words echo along my insides, the winding halls of my lungs and all the breaths I've taken into my own, the memory of air. Air, and all it carries with it.

If I follow the path of memory through my lungs, what might I find?
A bass line. Wildfire smoke. Her breath into my mouth on that day

December 2020.

Her flight has just landed, and I've just picked her up from the airport. She gets in the passenger seat, removes her mask, and kisses me.

Earlier that day, I texted to ask if she'd be okay with masking for a few days after she gets home, just a few days of quarantine to make sure she didn't catch anything. She tells me that she won't mask in her own home. "That's the place I should be able to feel safe." she tells me.

A couple days later, we're sitting in the basement together. I've just hit the bong and passed it back to her when she says

“You know what's weird? I haven't been able to taste anything recently.”

May 2023.
Everyone is vaccinated, and everyone is dancing.
I no longer wear a mask, and it seems like no one else does either. I let our highest hopes lull me into a false sense of security. With the vaccine, we are probably safe. It's no more than a cold.
I pencil in my moustache and circle my eyes in black. Emboldened by testosterone, longing to live a Hot Topic adolescence that I missed.
We call each other faggots and thrash beneath flashing lights to queer people singing queer music, breathing queer air.
We fear angry men with guns, but we do not fear each other.

December 2023.
I've been sick five times this year,

as opposed to my usual once-a-year cold. This time it's different. The COVID test comes back positive. This virus I tried my best to forget.

No one gets to see my mouth anymore. It is mine. It, and this new body, spinning in on itself endlessly.

"I'm okay. Just spiraling a little."

After this newest infection, the chest pain that's been there since December 2020 intensifies. I try not to look at it directly.

A month has passed. When I stay still, the world spins. When I move, my limbs fill with lead.

New symptoms keep arising. The newest: allergies to everything. I can't stop scratching. I want to pull my skin off.

Will it be this way forever?

I try going to concerts masked, but I can't keep from cross referencing the number of people in the room to current waste water statistics.

1 in 35 people currently contagious. 150 people in the room. Unending calculations.

I can barely hear the music over the question ringing in my ears: what will happen if I get sick again?

I become preoccupied with the mouths of others. I wonder where those mouths have been, what air they've breathed.

I try to tell the world around me. That it can happen to anyone. That the last thing they want is for it to happen to them.

My friends don’t want to talk about it. Strangers avert their eyes.

The sight of me reminds leftists of their hypocrisy, the gaps between their ideology and practice. Conservatives tell me I'm a fool.

Can I blame them? I, too, wanted to believe the pandemic was over.

The world keeps spinning. My body keeps aching. I keep masking. I fade from the life I once knew.

What is the alternative? Worsening with each infection, until my body can do nothing, until the pain gets to be too great? You never expect to be one of the "necessary sacrifices" to normalcy, until the day you are.

I long for simpler times. Longing means little in a pandemic.

If you are reading this, it is not yet too late for you to understand.
The only difference
between you and me
is time and chance.
If you live a careless life, you will run out of both.