The Armchair, Watercolor pencil on paper, 5″ x 5″
A friend, who recently finalized her divorce, asked me to make her a painting. One that might help her imagine her new life. To discover an image I might create, I wrote a short reflection on those issues she mentioned during our conversation.¹ Similar to Edwidge Danticat, writing is how “I process things, especially painful things” (56).2
The Conversation
Imagine being tossed away by the one you love. And before doing this, imagine that he did all he could to undermine your self-worth. When committed and so emotionally vulnerable such dissolution occurs more easily than you might think. Didn’t he find someone only days after he left? For how long had he been thinking more of her than you? If bent on abuse, the person you love knows exactly which doubts, fears, or uncertainties to raise from those gutters that inevitably scar a life together, claiming that detritus alone define you. And he does this without shame; he is happy and your pain only affirms his rectitude. And this caricature can’t be easily redrawn, and the only recourse you have is silence, a silence that extirpates the trust you once had in those words first whispered to you in a backseat a few hours before dawn.
At this moment, to whom would you turn? How would you set aside the feeling that losing his love was your fault, and move beyond the crippling embarrassment and fear this loss instills? Would you jump into another relationship and hide in its daily routines? Do to someone what was done to you and bring more pain into the world? Give up?
About the uncertainty that singes each syllable, who cares? Who cares what haunts you when mind opens to world? People claim, “friends and family” and they do what they can, but at some point, both get annoyed with your anxieties and fixations, with the rot your experience casts upon their lives. No one who cares about you can take it for long. They scold you for feeling what you could not unfeel, for evoking the loneliness that lurks at the end of any couch. But feelings are memories and have no half-lives. They can’t be set aside; they don’t decay.
Instead, they evolve, replacing one fading agony with another yet more vivid. They adapt, reflected in the mirror you can’t avoid, but that you hope will contradict the effects of time and consequence, age and injury. But often the image remains indistinct, a rheumy sight.
Maybe these thoughts are cynical, perhaps defeatist, but are they true? The past doesn’t write the future and the present is a palimpsest. Can you eradicate these lingering afterimages with drink or drugs; through positive thinking or the listing of your achievements, your good qualities; or by stacking assertions to wall out reality, buttressing them against its withering weight?
Hear “we have all been there.” Know “time will . . . and that all things happen for . . . and wine and cigarettes and weed . . . sunny days and rain on Sundays and songs . . . other songs . . . and still more songs . . . and wake up each morning with the warble of a magpie ‘warning of love.’³” Upon what observation can your mind rest?
Only the weak ask, “What am I supposed to do now?” Only the weak pose the question before its answer. But one foot does follow upon the impression of the other; each wants to go. All you know is that you don’t wish to blink out, even if that means pushing your vulnerabilities before you like crumbs across the kitchen counter. So you ask questions and sit quietly among a jumble of possibilities, at awe with a life that is uncertain–knowing that something, not nothing, will happen.
¹Obviously this account is fictionalized. If you know me, don’t try to guess who I was talking to. If you asked, I would say “a ghost” or maybe “a phantom.”
²Danticat, Edwige. “An Interview with Edwidge Danticat.” Slice (Spring/Summer 2017). 54-57.
³adapted from Avett Brothers’ “Morning Song.”
An American Scholar 