In my twenties, I lived in a dilapidated punk house with a girl I met on Craigslist, Sage, an art school dropout who made tiny abstract clay figurines which she'd photograph then slip into strangers' mailboxes. She was obsessed with ephemerality, and placed vases of flowers around the house to document their decay, taking fastidious notes—two petals fell, slightly browner, smells bad, etc—before burning the desiccated remains in our driveway. "Matter is just like language," she told me, "only more deceptive, really. At least with language you know it doesn't last, but matter makes you think it'll be around forever. But it always slips away."
   
This was before I wrote poems or stories, though I wrote every day, long meandering shapeless experiments that I'd read to her in our kitchen while we sipped wine from ceramic mugs. Great, great, is all she ever said as I spouted a stream of surreal nonsense. She wasn't interested in meaning, but its inverse, the shadow left in its wake. "That's what life really is," she said, "everything we think it isn't, or actually, everything we never thought it could be."
   
For the gleaming year we lived together, art and life were merely materials in our grand experiment, like an acid and base in chemistry class. We'd pour them together just to watch the explosion. One night in our kitchen, after a few too many mugs of wine, she got an idea for an art project. "Let's make a pillow fight! Not, like, here right now, but a big one, all around the city." This was in the days of Myspace, so she whipped up an anonymous profile, PillowFightPdx, on which she included a date, time, location, and some rules: May 3rd, 6pm, waterfront park, come with your pillow concealed, no pillow loading.
   
"It's like, the fight isn't real," she said while typing up the profile, "at least not yet, but it will be real because people think it is. You know how in quantum physics they say that nothing is real until it's observed? The pillow fight is like that. It's like this giant quantum particle."
   
Over the coming weeks, the profile grew a steady following that snowballed until the local indie newspaper wrote about it and a cashier at the grocery store asked if I'd heard of it. I said I hadn't. When we showed up on the night of the fight, our pillows tucked under our shirts, the crowd was in the thousands: face-painted children, a roller derby team dressed in nightgowns, throngs of drunken college kids. Local news crews showed up with bright lights and chipper reporters who posed vapid questions to random participants: are you having fun? Can you show us your pillow? A taco truck sold pillow-shaped empanadas. Just like Sage said, it was real because people thought it was. At 6pm sharp, a blow horn sounded and the fighting began. Feathers rained on the squealing crowd, accompanied by Jefferson Airplane's album Surrealistic Pillow, which blasted from a boom box that one of the roller derby girls brought.
   
After the fight, Sage and I sat along the river, dusted in feathers, and ate empanadas. "You know, in a way, the fight only existed in people's minds," she said while pulling a thread of cheese from her chin. "It's like all art really, a figment of everyone's imagination." She looked dreamily out over the water that mirrored the lights of the city. "I mean, it did happen," she held up a feather as proof, "but my experience of it was totally different from yours or that roller derby girl. In a way, there were a thousand different fights, one for each person there." We sat for a while in silence, watching the lights on the water waver and break with each passing boat, lost in our own realities, unsure how, or if, they overlapped.

A couple years later Sage moved to New York and landed a big solo show in a blue-chip gallery, some performance where she lived in a transparent tent in the gallery for a month, eating only Cliff Bars and Snickers, the wrappers of which she'd leave outside the tent, little souvenirs the audience was encouraged to take home. It was supposed to be about voyeurism and waste in late capitalist America, at least according to her artist's statement. After that she got pretty big and now teaches at Columbia and has a big studio in Dumbo. When I looked at her CV online, there it was: pillow fight performance, along with the dried flowers and clay figurines. It seemed strange that art about ephemerality, art that resisted the idea of product at all, could be so neatly packaged. I was happy for her. She had done what I'd always wanted to do. She'd made a real thing, something that mattered—even if, like Sage always said, matter slips away.



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