Katherine sat across my studio and watched with tired eyes. I had been priming and sanding a wide canvas for the better part of three days. This was my fourteenth coat. In the process, a pointed search for the perfect satin surface that eluded me for days, I had lost myself in the battle for the first time in years. My annual review and defense was in forty-eight hours, and I was laboring over the surface of a canvas I’d spend the summer on. Even though my original intent was to wow them with a quick and unexpected final painting. My obsession with the primer couldn’t be explained. Each additional coat spelled potential doom.
Unlike my normal, fairly clean self, I had given in to gesso muse and let my shoes, pants, and shirt become stained in the war’s white blood. In fact, I hadn’t changed in four days. I had taken showers, changed briefs, and slept. But I never even tried to scrub the white spots across my limbs, and my battered clothes seemed to be the only thing worth wearing back into the fray. Somewhere in the mix I gained awareness that the surface wasn’t the only thing. I’d stare into that white thick of chalk across the linen, sanding in circles for so long that the finger I fractured months ago turned blue all over again. I’d watch the molecules of dried acrylic barely shift and shine, and I’d cringe with surprise at the feeling I always knew as a broken heart.
“I’m glad you’re wearing those gray pants,” said Katherine tilting her head, “and that white shirt. They look like they need to be here.”
“Why,” I asked in bland ignorance, stroking the linen slow with a blade, “because they match the spotted floor?”
“No, because it looks right. If I had instant amnesia, and looked at you now, I’d think everything was OK, I’d think you’re a regular hard-working painter making a painting. Everything belongs.”
I laughed, and so did she. But beneath the chuckle I was stricken by her explanation. Because if it were I that suddenly awoke to my current self, unaware of what came previous, I would shudder at this life’s absurdity. There are other lives I could wake to that might give me the feeling she described, in which all’s alright. Even lives I’ve spent years less living than this one. Like the dream of working the ranch with my granddad and uncle. We’d eat dinner tired, tell simple jokes and reminisce the day with some combination of cattle, dirt, and weather. I could wake to that. I’ve daydreamt such dreams just as often as I entertain myself with the idea of a loving perfect lady. I could leave it all behind for the day-in day-out of nowhere in America, a plot just east of Wyoming.
But to wake to this, to see the life I lead and take it as truth, my mind wouldn’t rest easy. To come to, the moment I apply the fourteenth coat of premium Pearl across a wide skin of nothing, and watch myself sand it down again. I’d feel a sadness and wide-eyed wonder. And the moment Katherine likened the nature of her thoughts to the void of memory and purpose that amnesia brings, waking from an unforgettable dream is just what I was doing. Like mornings your eyes open to the empty sound of the sky coming in the window, lifting you from the sweetest place that you’d die to fall back to. I’d watch my hands move in circles without my orders, see the tiny dry bubbles slowly turn to a porcelain gleam, and feel the space behind my eyes strain for something desolate and true.
I was sad. And the only reason I couldn’t tell Katherine, or anyone else is the same reason I’ve always avoided admitting it simply. Because I love my sadness. I was born with it. It stays by me in joy and without, and I cherish its every turn. It is the fabric of my insides that tells me when to speak, when to sleep, how to make people laugh, who to trust, what love is, and how long to wait on anything that requires a wait. It is my sadness that tells me something older than us all is hiding. The sadness lives in my shoulders, and she whispers. My greatest hope is that so long as I’m here, she never leaves me. Without her, I wouldn’t just be blind, I’d be mute. I’d be plain.
There’s no mysterious wind, no mythic pretense that makes me sad. I’d love to name the sky or the seasons as my reason, but in the end it’s people. Just like everybody else, there’s a person or two I can always trace it back to. I arrived in a gorgeous world where people hurt, and that’s nothing that ever stopped, and something I’ve never gotten over.
After days, the surface finally came. I’d sweep my hand and let my fingers fall across the buried linen and sigh with pleasure at the touch. At my review, it hung alone across my working wall without a stroke of colored paint. Eight feet of baby skin titanium white.
I wasn’t sure how it’d go, there weren’t many clues. For our own pride, we graduates were all sure to think of dismissal as a real possibility, though it probably wasn’t. Taking it even further, I began to fantasize about what I might do if such a judgement came. Shame or failure were no longer heavy words. I only feared how I might frame it for the folks. But from there it was nothing but fantasy. I’d find a way to go some place and get there. A place like California, Lisbon, or the Ranch. I could work off each dime of the forty grand one year at a time, from some place nobody would find me if they ever chose to look. And from there I could craft my days with something quiet and important. Finally filling the hours that remain with the purpose I was born to. And save one or two, nobody’d need to know my name. I’d wake each day just to see the pale thin sky.
It’s a dream that ought never come, and I only think of making it real when there’s a true chance I might be thrown from the current ride. It may be fear, but it feels like hope. And with that in mind, it was to my own surprise that my instructors found what I’d thought was forever hidden. Their hands slid across my painting unbegun and their lips smiled at what they called a corner I had turned. What life is this, I thought. For us adults to adore a surface, and for me to “achieve” something that is yet to even mean. Who else truly dreams? Surely there are others, sad and unafraid.
Only two days later, I packed a tent and little else for the desert west and below, leaving with bad brakes and a full tank of pricey gas. There I planned to find the hope and patience I would need to live another privileged year beneath and between bright lights and white walls. I’d let the dust sift across each crack of my skin, and it would powder my belongings so that months from now I can remember the barren wilds. Under the breathing midnight sky I watched the stars, wondering aloud at when they might wither and fall. It’d be so pretty.