I draw faces and hang them up on my wall, stare in the eyes of someone I’ve never known. I shape their features and study them, plaster them to my wall so I awake to faces looking back at me, as if I’ve been born again. Without a past or name. Without a story. Without having left loved ones, and killing ladybugs that happened to crawl into my room. I deliberately sketch cheekbones and eye sockets, blatantly different from anyone I’ve ever hurt, so I can look at someone anew and tell myself I haven’t hurt them. I can wonder what their story is, as if they’re a pleasant kind stranger. I can trace over the lies I tell myself, and pick relentlessly over the fabricated tale, tell myself their life is better than mine.
Blankly, like a deer in headlights or awestruck, like a curious child, I study the planes of human faces. Of sculptures, that can not meet my gaze or vanish within a crowd. That stay stuck, still and frozen in time. Unlike the encounters of my past. With the people I once knew. No longer do. All too fluid, liquid beneath my fingers. Frames, eye movements and inhales too quick.
I can write like this and I can scribble faces to forget the ones of the people I’ve hurt. So I can remember only the ones of the people I loved, well upon opening my eyes to a new world. One day I’ll accidentally sketch the portrait of someone who is meant for a while and not just a few heartbreak-seasons.
I can create art, but remind me, what is the point? Does it resolve any feelings? Is it ever seen by another? Through it, am I seen by another?
I loathe the compulsion to create, without the enjoyment or fulfillment of its process. I despise the chore of it, the necessity, the obligation, yet I can not stand life without it. I respect the compulsion, more than I do a lot of things. I respect the drive, and I am thankful for it in the grand scheme of things. In the dead of the night, I loathe the trails of thoughts, merging and meshing into another trying to build a story, a sentence, a scene as the letters rearrange themselves and shift between languages, scriptures. The responsibility of making sense of what is in my head perpetually exhausts me, but who am I without it?
I wish I didn’t feel to the extent that I do, yet I respect it, honor it, promise to make sense and good use of it. I wish there were less alienation in intensity. I wish people and myself, felt less like cardboard copies of one another, less like we are trying to be less human, trying to feel less, little, not at all. Mock those for feelings. I wish we could unlearn the need to learn to care less.
I wish we didn’t believe we needed to outgrow child-like wonder, whimsy, empathy to learn distance, detachment. I wish we didn’t have to dry ourselves into clay, marble, bronze at the epitome of our least emotional, externally beautiful selves. I want to be aged by feelings. I want to let my face feel alive human tears. I want the dampness of my pillowcase to bear witness to the life I’ve lived and the person I’ve outgrown. I want to never freeze into marble out of the fear that liquid can not stand on it’s own, that it will always collapse.
I want to never fear that in this big wide world my words hold no significance, my face will never be etched into another’s memory for eternity. I don’t know why I write. I don’t know why I taught myself to write. I don’t know why I learned to articulate what the world tells me I shouldn’t feel, ruminate, overthink, pay heed to. I wish I didn’t see myself so clearly. I wish I didn’t know what I was feeling so clearly. I wish self-expression through words, colors, movement and sound was more courageous than hiding it into the shadows on your face, in the room behind your eyes.
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