āthe curtains werenāt blue on purpose. why should we care?ā
my love! let me ask you this - did you eat breakfast today? this tiny moment in your life. just think about it. did you?
for some of you, the answer is yes and for some of you it is technically and for some of you it is does coffee count. some of you reached for cereal or gmo-free overnight oats or frozen waffles or 3-day-old pizza. sometimes we eat the same thing, every day, for weeks. i get tired of eggs randomly, only to go back to craving them desperately. iām cuban; i take my coffee like my father showed me, very milky and sweet.
some of us ate in a hurry. some of us hate eating breakfast but if we donāt we will get nauseous later. some of us took our meds first or took our meds after. some of us have a kitchen 5 feet wide and sometimes itās the biggest room in the house. some of us are confident there will be food in the pantry and some of us flinch and say well, the paycheck is coming. some of us turn on a podcast while we eat or we scroll our phones or write in our diaries.
some of us are choosing, specifically, not to eat breakfast. some of us are too busy. some of us are pretending we ājust forgot,ā but we are ignoring the warning signs that everything feels too-heavy. some of us are so consumed with anxiety or grief that we canāt eat. some of us canāt stand up long enough to make our coffee. some of us have no table to sit down and eat.
i cannot tell you what an artist āmeantā by their choices. but they did have to make a choice, conscious or otherwise, to give you information. to give you a little bit more light. each of these choices are little stars of data; connecting speckles for you to weave through, drawing a line.
you cannot use a mirror in a dark room. for some of us; we will not care that the curtains are blue, because that will just be a data point and not enough light to see by. for some of us, the blue curtains will be the same as our childhood bedroom. it will make us seasick. for some of us, blue will be the color of frostbite. it might look like a pixel up close; but from a distance, oh! the picture blooms.
i cannot tell you what will stick out for you. what will carry meaning. some of you will read the sentence āi didnāt have breakfast todayā and say āthis means nothing.ā some of you will read that and say āoh, me neither.ā some of you will say āthis means the character is probably a little grouchy.ā some of you will say āoh, i wonder if theyāre okay. why didnāt they eat anything?ā ⦠art is a mirror. i am holding hands with you, over space and time, and asking you to feel something with me.
i want you to read my work and find a blue pair of curtains. i want you to read my work and find things in it that i never imagined placing. i have no way of knowing what will resonate with you, thatās true. and maybe i just was hungry while i wrote this, and thinking about the eggs in my fridge. but if you found meaning, that meaning is yours. it cannot be erased just because i didnāt āintendā it. you created a different world by interpreting my work. itās collaborative! thatās beautiful! thatās stunning!
just! imagine looking at the night sky and saying - itās stupid to have a favorite constellation or a favorite star. theyāre just there.
because hereās the thing - across centuries and cultures, we look up. we still find meaning in the stars. these beautiful, lovely scattered accidents. are you looking? they call. and we look back and say oh! of course we are!