17

the first thing i read when i woke up was a piece about emotionalism, emotionalism in painting. and i sat in my bathroom thinking about the big brass bell inside me that chimed. and it's a day of false-spring, just one day, and i remember a painting i once made on a canvas made of scraps that i sewed together, and i remember that winter, that false-spring, and the veil lifts and i'm excited to go to the studio instead of the listless obligatory get-me-out-of-the-house-i-need-to-get-out-of-bed-so-i-go-to-the-studio-and-smoke-halfheartedly-and-paint-halfheartedly-and-so-on routine.

and it's perfect, soir bleu like your favourite painting, and this painting is a painting about a painting about you, about a painting about a conversation i once had at majestique, about all the candles you blew out for me (conversely, the candles you lit for me). i mean that literally. i mean that figuratively. i mean, remember how you would blow out a tea light and roll the hot wax around and around just for something to do with your hands?

the blue paint turns my hands blue, my blue hands turn my face blue.

i acted on the ecstatic impulse

i acted on the sincere

if i hadn't already made a sequel to the bath painting, i would want to paint a painting about that painting again. i think i could make a different image of the same experiences now, i don't think it's a bath painting anymore. but the clown-church-candle painting is still a clown-church-candle painting.

i cried before work, smoking with my chef in our little alcove in the plaza. i cried first because i woke up with a deep dread in my chest and an inability to articulate why. i cried second because she told me she had cried earlier in the day, when a song had reminded her of our old colleague at our ex-job who died two years ago. metaphorically dead in a ditch, like he once told me he would go. how insane it was that none of us ever really talked about it, how the news spread between staff in quiet voices and phone calls from the walk-in, how the staff found out at all.

in our alcove we talk about all the things that astound us, catch us off guard in our sudden memories of him. there are bands that i always associate with him. some movies we would talk about at the bar. certain stretches of street, when he would insist on walking me partway home.

kyoto-awadaguchichorakujiyamacho

in the Higashiotani cemetery there is a tree whose leaves wiggle like loose teeth about to fall out of an impatient child's mouth. and the sleeping-giant-mountains sleep in a ring around Kyoto, and the world is made up of halos on top of halos on top of halos (and halos inside of halos inside of halos.)

blue-sky-halo on top of cloud-sky-halo on top of mountain-beings-halo on top of tombstone-building-city halo and above that, the tombstone-halo on the hill-halo. (and there's the me-halo inside it all.)

biking halfway up the mountain where it just starts to begin to rise just to bike back down the other side - humbled for the first time by the mountain i used to laugh at and call a big hill - hill, my ass, this thing is a mountain and i have a new respect for inclines. or more so, the spirituality of an incline, the spirituality of a mountain. the spiritual physicality of the mountain.

and somehow through art it is impossible to lie, even posthumously

(finding truth in old lies that began as truth but lost their way.)

heat makes me do impossible things. all the things i'm so fond of, all the edges i see blurring in the stifling thickness of breathing. forced to confront the acclimatization capability. forced to breathe thick air in thick air out sweat thick skin slick tar wet and the body is truly reduced to a body. bare skin like a suit you are forced to wear. i give a standing ovation to the end of the performance of it all.

full and entire and then bereft and unfit - despondent in the face of urgency and the paradox of any attempt. attempting anyways. a hopeful face that gazes into the mirror but only sees a poor reflection back. and i'm a million years old. and i'm the youngest person i've ever been. sitting on the floor. eating a plum. sucking the pit.

i dream impossible dreams in the world i wish i lived in, but instead i dream entirely possible things just barely out of the realm of reality. i dream these thinly veiled truths over and over, i keep dreaming that you keep hurting me and when i wake up it takes me too long to remember you will never hurt me like that again.

i keep thinking there's blood on me, but it usually turns out to be beet juice, and i keep thinking that i'm bruised in some improbable place, but it turns out to be some kind of tar, or grime, or grease. and i live a life where that makes more sense than blood, or bruises.

i still walk away from every weekend with cuts on my hands and bruises on my legs and burns on my arms.