Instructions For Reunion
Text Erika Ruonakoski
A. How to reconnect with your dog:
1. After your dog has died, throw a bedspread on the floor, like you might do if you are a lazy person getting ready for bed. If you are a tidy person, you can place the bedspread unstably on a chair, so that it slips on the floor as if you didn’t mean it to happen. The heaped-up bedspread has to be about the size of your dog. For smaller dogs use a garment or towel of the appropriate size.
2. Walk in the room without paying attention to the bedspread. Forget about the bedspread, don’t look at it, just do the things you usually do.
3. At some point you can see your dog out of the corner of your eye, lying on the floor as she used to. Don’t turn your gaze to see the dog better, or she will disappear and you will be left with the bedspread.
4. Repeat. You can have a great number of this kind of reunions out of the corner of your eye with your dog before she is gone for good.
B. How to reconnect with your green parakeet:
1. Place a big plant like the Swiss cheese plant near the place where the bird’s perch used to be. If you already have one there, even better. The leaves of the plant need to be more or less the same colour as the bird was, so this is easiest to do if your parakeet was green. Inanimate objects of the bird’s colour and size can also be used to arrange the reunion with the bird.
2. Have one of the leaves positioned so that it has a vaguely parakeet-like shape, thicker from one end and pointed from the other. It should be at the same height from the floor as the perch used to be. The leaf has to stand out from the rest of the plant, so that you can see it against the background formed by a wall or window.
3. Go out of the room. Forget about the plant.
4. Come back into the room. Now your parakeet is exactly where he used to be, on his perch.
5. If you don’t want your parakeet to vanish, don’t look at him too intently, just let him be.
6. This works even years after the parakeet has died, so if you don’t want to be running into him constantly, you need to occasionally change the position of the plant so that none of the “right” leaves are at the height where the bird used to perch.
Instructions for reuniting with your dead parent at a distance
1. When your parent has passed away, go to a city centre where you can see a lot of people walking in the street. Sooner or later, you will see the figure of your late parent within the crowd.
2. Do not look at them in the face, because that will make your dead parent vanish, and you will be left with somebody who only vaguely resembles them. So, remember, you can only reunite with your dead parent at a distance – close contact is impossible!
