In Hollie’s Home, 2025

In Hollie’s home, we wake up and the poetry begins.

Side by side in the curtain drawn room, thick with our slumber, crusty eyes and still haven’t had that first sip of water, in the chill of the AC, our pillow talk is full of visions of romance and yearning for the beautifully adorned, for lovers who wear overalls, dreams for a love bound by earth, and thanking god for my fully developed brain — I feel like I can think clearly for the first time in my life and it feels decadent, I am basking in it, thank god for ungraceful aging, thank god for the mess of not knowing and knowing through the not knowing, thank god for the lessons and adventures of a girl surviving, of a girl roaming Earth in search of love and a safe place to land as if it could live somewhere halfway around the world, as if it would come from anywhere beyond this earthly animal soft river of a body, anywhere but the rawness, tenderness of girlhood.

Girlhood never ends. Girlhood is the forever love — they sold us the wrong image of it. True love is two women who never stop being girls, who wake up together with visions of romance and soak in the deliciousness of becoming themselves again after the loss of a lover. I think everyone who has ever loved probably feels like they invented it because although they’ve been telling me that boys come and go but friendship is forever since junior high, in this moment I think it must have been us who invented that cliche because truth is one thing but a different thing altogether when it enters you with a holiness, you a divine and aching portal, faced with the exquisiteness of the mess on the kitchen counter, the mess of my things piled on your floor, the mess of the morning light — oh how the mundane rips your heart in shreds in a way that is heartbreaking in its godliness.

You are still in bed as I fumble through the broken drawer for your incense, the OG one, the only one that truly gets it right, that tells me that home has arrived, and I leave it to burn on your ash covered table, an ongoing work of art, the mess we leave and intentionally allow to stay. I come back to the room as you are still in bed in your sweet luteal mess and I open the bedroom curtains and you tell me — I love how at home you are — which said in another tone could be construed as an overstaying, but in yours I know is an invitation to soak in the sanctity of this moment, this home we make together and for each other.

Partnership is easy, I see now. It is not hard work that makes a partnership, but soft work, the tender dance of two beings whose hearts are unfurled no matter the luteal, the mundanity, the work and the mess to be made and had. Two beings who see the art to be made in every moment of the being. We are here for the being, we are the being. To assume any separation is to remove the art from the living. And then what would we have left?

In Hollie’s Home was produced while in residence at Kala Art Institute in 2025.

EDITION OF 2
BOOKBOARD, INKJET PRINT ON ASUKA PAPER, WASHI PAPER, COLORED PENCIL, GLUE

Lucy Mu Li