If I were taller

An autofictional short story accompanying If I were taller, Jan Manton Gallery, 29 August-4 September 2022.

i
You are John or Julius or Leonid or Al and things are different. You are indisputably tall and maybe even the tallest. But to be tall beyond measure paradoxically requires precise measurement and precisely how tall you are is unclear. Your outline seems to shift and your edge seems to blur such that is not only your height that is in dispute but you.

ii
So you joke that your beauty is just of a kind that moves but you don’t really believe yourself. You know that Robert and John and John and Sultan and even Väinö are each so precisely Robert and John and John and Sultan and Väinö that their height could never be disputed. Without any awareness of doing so you begin to compensate for your uncertain height by claiming a certain beauty. You make yourself ornate and round and endless and decorate your character with diacritics.

You are Jön or Jûlius or Léonid or Æl and things are different.

iii
Now you are old but you are still tall. You lay down on the bed and your legs reach past its end and keep going until your feet and your sophistication go out the window. You remember or you dream - you’re not sure which - of when the bed was bigger and the window farther away.