Steven Rahbany

A lot of my work reflects on past and present memories as a form of travel, experiencing simultaneous moments in time. When I was thirteen, my dad committed suicide. The week after, there was a blur of feelings and memories. One memory I have is seeing everyone in my family on the phone with their closest person, a friend, or a partner, in what I assume was them confiding and letting out their emotions. I didn’t have that at the time and experienced this extreme sense of aloneness that later I would find to be core to how I navigate emotions and connections. I felt like I had all these intense feelings with no one really to hear them. I was screaming into an abyss with no one on the other side of the phone.

In today’s online communication, it is often the case that you are “left on read,” whether it’s from a date, a friend, or usually from a Grindr hookup. While not as traumatic as a suicide, sometimes it triggers those same emotions that I had when I was thirteen. The sense of speaking into an air of nothing, not knowing if you’re being heard. The same core emotion, felt across time from two different experiences. For me it’s a form of time travel that lets us move between time and space.