I Can’t Bring Myself to See it Starting: Mark Hollis and Talk Talk

painting of the garden of eden
The Garden of Eden by the Limbourg Brothers

By Joseph Barresi

I had a trundle bed in New Zealand. It belonged to my landlords and I slept on it in the basement room they had set up for their preteen daughter, until she developed a fear of living in a semi-detached space, darker and cooler, from her parents and younger brother upstairs. The bedroom was a soft pink when I moved in, and over three sunny late spring evenings in early December, I rolled white paint over it with my landlady, Kristi. It was just the trundle, there, under the bed, soft maple slats on its rollers. My landlords had taken the single futon mattress that had rested on the trundle for family guests that would occasionally visit. I would store miscellaneous shit in the gap between my mattress and the wood: half-dirty shirts and half-empty bottles of wine. They left, however, the heavy canvas curtains imprinted with the same four fairies in various states of repose and reflection, by soft shallow pools in verdant green shifting light. Two were brunette, one blonde, and one redhead. They wore Easter-colored dresses.