H+H Arts
Night Comes On
9.26.25 – 10.31.25
I was not born into a dark room with rounded edges and walls made of earth. I was not born in candle light, in sunlight, in moonlight, in starlight. There was no breeze, no scent, no cicada song. There were no flowers, no petals and stamens waving and pulsing when I arrived.
I was born into a rectangular room. I came through a tunnel and there I found myself: in a rectangular, fluorescent-lit room, in a rectangular building, on a rectangular block, in a geometric grid of streets. The room hummed with machinery. My mother hummed with bupivacaine and chloroprocaine.
Inside the dark room I came from, everything was bathed in a rose-colored glow. Light filtered through her body, which was also my room, which was also my mother. She was the room, and she was a cave, and she was me, and she was my home.
When night comes, warm light will flicker on earthen walls until the flames go out, then the sky will reveal itself. Infinite pin-pricks of light will encircle the dark. Movement will subside into stillness, impermanence left to dance in space, stamens and petals of flowers as big as elephants waving, waving in a soft rounded world without us.
- Cyrus Dunham, 2025