Tag: grief

shh

Larissa2 Comments

I seem to be writing a graphic novel.  It’s a weird little love story.  I kind of don’t want to be writing it, and yet I can’t seem to stop.  It feels like chewing my way out of a cocoon.  My jaw hurts and my teeth are getting worn down.  Why not just stay inside?  It was pretty comfortable in here for a long time.  But I can’t stop.  Something wants out.

Here is part of a sketchy little cartoon that I made a few weeks ago, while I was storyboarding:

Nick Cave said:

…the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad…

Good grief, I’m sad.  And I notice that I don’t want to be sad, and large parts of me aren’t sad.  Maybe it’s more like I have a Big Sad in me.  And I try to paint over it with “at least” and “look at everything I learned,” but it’s still there.

Please don’t let me fuck this up by making it a Hate Story disguised as a love story.  I want it to be something trustworthy.

My brain often finds Bayo Akomolafe‘s written words inscrutable, but interesting things happen in my body when I listen to him.  “Yes,” says the body. “There’s no clarity in here.  There may never be clarity.  Maybe it doesn’t matter.”  The brain struggles to remember what he said.  “Shh,” says the body.

What does any of that have to do with the story I’m trying to tell?

Shh.  There’s no clarity.  It doesn’t matter.

swarm

Larissa3 Comments

I’m not sure when I started her.  How can I say when these things begin?  Is it when I start taking steps towards making a tangible object?  The earliest photo I have is from late 2018, but by then she was pretty far along.  Is it when the idea first appears in my head, having arrived from who-knows-where?  I was writing about her in late 2017.

And what about when it begins as one thing and turns into something completely different?  What then?  Who’s to say she wasn’t always a swarm of smaller sculptures waiting to happen?  She had a name, but I have forgotten it.

It was mid-February when I started taking her apart.  I’d moved everything into the new studio a few weeks before that, and had finally done enough unpacking to begin to feel at home.  I was grieving, like I do when something ends.  Like I do, for longer than most people would say is reasonable.  Like I do, even when it’s been over for years and life is actually not so bad.  I sometimes think that when-life-is-not-so-bad is the best time for grieving.

Anyway: I was enormously sad, and I started taking her apart.  Here she is, without her lower half, without her back.

I made a couple of smaller sculptures with the wire I salvaged, plus other things I found around the studio – a handful of blue beads, an assortment of washers and springs, a worn wire brush that someone left behind after cleaning a furnace.

And I started to feel a little less bereft.  And I made a couple more.

And then we were in the middle of a pandemic.  Remember the year you thought you were going to have?  Kiss it goodbye.

I kept making little sculptures until I had used up all the salvaged wire.  As I worked, it seemed more and more appropriate to be giving up the thing I had thought I would be doing.  They had names, these smaller sculptures.  They had names, but I have forgotten them.  By the time I finished, I wasn’t sad about the same things I’d been sad about when I started.

People sometimes ask me how long it takes to make a sculpture.  The answer is: however many years I’ve been alive when I finish it.  This swarm of little sculptures took me 52 years.

good grief

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(Snoopy smoking a blunt and Charlie Brown with a cup of purple drank on a train in White River Junction this morning) IMG_0648

I used up most of my courage at a Reiki training over the weekend. Now I have just enough to show up for Notebook Club, but not enough to write the way I want to. Everyone else dives into the sea of words. I pretend to swim. They think the rest of me is in the water with them, but really it’s just my head floating on the surface.

Most of the essential bits are back in the relative safety of the boat.

In my dreams I drive the way I used to, merging onto the interstate at 65 miles per hour like it’s no big thing. Like visiting my family wouldn’t be the end of the world.

It all reminds me of when I sprained my knee and dreamed nightly of running up and down the stairs.

“I’m not even sure why I’m here,” I said to the instructor in a moment of panic.

“Because you want to heal,” she answered.

Don’t we all?

And don’t we all wish sometimes that healing was more linear and straightforward?

I climbed onto the table. She put her hot hands over my eyes, my ears, my heart.

On the next table, another student began to snore softly. Tears spilled down the sides of my face and into my hair.

I never did manage to unclench both fists at the same time while she was working on me.

they don’t want me

Larissa2 Comments

Kathy asked if I had ever written that story on one of my canvas prints. I had not, which was both surprising and not-surprising-at-all.

So I started. It’s coming out in the disjointed way that these stories do. Not a straight line, but a zig-zag lightning-strike path.

when i was nine, my mother got very sick

Last year E suggested that I write a question with my right hand, then answer it with my left hand.

Q: What are these panic attacks about?

A: they don’t want me they don’t want me they don’t want me

I woke up at 3 o’clock the other morning, having put the pieces together in my sleep. Suddenly knowing that “they don’t want me” belonged on this piece of canvas with the rest of the story.

IMG_0629

Back in E’s office, after we finish laughing about the wastebasket, I pull up this picture on my phone. We pass the phone back and forth. There’s not much talking. I zoom in on the details, one after another, so she can see the whole thing.

it got worse. i decided to run away.

A list of the things I had in my pockets when I left:

  • two dollars and sixty-three cents
  • a girl scout knife
  • a small red and silver flashlight

Last, but not least:

i brushed my hair for once.

We’ve been working together for more than five years, but I’m not sure I’ve ever told her that before. I’m not sure I could have said it aloud.

E looks up at me. We’re both crying.

Some things can never be fixed, but maybe you can find a way to stop being alone with them.