Untitled 3/7/08
I loved my hands the first summer I was in love with her. I was flailing, ill-equipped to deal with the rate at which my life was exploding around me, the rate at which I was falling. I was stranded, a fish out of water. A writer who could not write. A writer who wouldn’t even put pen to paper out of fear of the truth that might pour out of it more like blood than ink.
The first girl I ever loved told me that the way to get over the second girl I ever loved was to make an art book, to “channel my creativity into something productive.” Thus girl number one bequeathed to me an old hardcover book onto which I was supposed to pour my soul via paintings and drawings and doodles and whatever else I could think to put on its pages. So I worked for hours every day, sometimes forgetting to eat, always forgetting that I am not an artist in this way. And after hours of paint fume inhalation that made my head spin I had created a masterpiece and a monster. I had created something that was one part self-portrait and three parts shrine to girl number two. I had created something that I can now neither bring myself to look at nor to throw away.
When I was younger I had inspirational quotes of all kinds taped to the closet doors in my bedroom. Quotations that I ripped down while crying at four in the morning one day the second summer I was in love with her. I got to the one that said “Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real,” and I sat on my floor, cross-legged in a pile of torn papers, staring at it until the sun came up.
I don’t miss anything about either summer. Anything except my hands smeared with Technicolor paint.
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