(Beth Hoeckel, with “Silver Gemini Keychain” by Rick Owens)
This story is part of the May issue of Image. homeworkabout home and the many ways we choose to make it.
In this sunny and gloomy city, it's not just that things are often not what they seem: they are further that. Excess competes with restraint for the same parking spot and they keep promising each other that they will have lunch (neither can decide if they want to follow through). The young and experienced attend the same cocktail hour and both leave early: one, so as not to miss the last bus to the Eastside; the other, being well rested for the hot Pilates at 7 in the morning. Making this metropolitan oasis in the desert a home requires a certain cognitive dissonance, a willingness to accept that multiple worlds will nest within each other simultaneously forever and that there is nothing you can do about it (nor would you want to). After all, the patch of sunlit pool water reflecting off the underside of an umbrella on a 75-degree June day is just the mirror image of a cold, dirty May fog crystallized on palm trees. that line the cracked asphalt streets. Thanks to the ever-providential Mercurial gods, we have been granted permission to depart in Taurus season. Everyone knows that Gemini season is for both of you.
Anyone who has ever tried to make a Gemini (another type of desert oasis) a home understands, for better or worse, that their beloved is an enigma of contradictions that somehow makes too much sense when viewed as the sum. of an entire kaleidoscopic. It is in the spirit of this flexible duality that we find the Rick Owens Silver Gemini Keychain, aptly and concisely named because, well, isn't it obvious?
Housework is an art, a craft, a practice, a burden, a necessity, a privilege.
A smooth brass circle meets a confident silver-toned rectangle in a sacred geometric union that could inspire a passive allegory of the masculine-feminine from a less inventive mind (sorry, Virgo). But for our intentions and purposes, we consider the tool (apparatus?) of the keychain with more care and depth. It is a ship meant to be safe, supposed to be trustworthy, the bearer of the most prized everyday possessions that simply cannot be misplaced, at the risk of inconvenience at best, and catastrophe at worst. It's funny how we rely on these pieces of metal to protect other pieces of metal, our access to our homes, our most intimate and vulnerable places.
Housework is an art, a craft, a practice, a burden, a necessity, a privilege. It's in the talismans we place within our homes, from randomly purchased necessities to carefully considered luxuries. It is the memory of a former lover washing a glass of wine stolen from the bar down the street after Sunday night dinner, a dusty footprint left by a relative who ventured into a forgotten crevice. Housework can be taken care of, attended to obsessively, or ignored completely; After all, it's Gemini season and that means we can do whatever we want. But building a home is something we are all forced to consider at one time or another. And surprisingly, it all starts with a key, a small piece of carved metal that, like all of us, needs something to keep it safe, even if that something contains as many multitudes as the city itself.
Goth Shakira is a digital conjurer based in Los Angeles.
