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It sits face up on the table, catching the morning sun and gathering the dust of a shitty old apartment in the city. I keep food and drink far from it. Every few hours it asks me to come back, look, and remember what it taught me. Laid out like a wake for one, and it feels like we’re trading places.
Returning to tattoo weeks feels like touching home after an eternity of running bases. I lost count of how many I rounded in the past two weeks. Something was made of all that chaos. Something was lost, too. But the thing came into being, and it showed me art’s mastery over my mind.
I admitted a lot to myself this past week in the making. At first, with a looming deadline, I worried nothing good would come. All that worry was in the way, as it goes. What does good mean? What is a deadline? What is anyone expecting from the work I’ll share? It’s a rough place to be, but what’s produced is the act of sitting with it. That’s what the whole thing looks like. Manhandling the process is the surest way to kink the hose of the creative fury, and nothing good comes from that.
Deliverance took me to the swamp and pulled me under, steadily and without pause. Nearly every medium I know came out of drawers, cabinets, and closets, and once I was finally in over my head, nothing else mattered. Sleep was exhaustion. The hallucinations were dehydration and mental fatigue. My appetite was singular and insatiable. My fingers are cut up from needles, nails, and exacto blades. My lungs took a hit from six or seven kinds of adhesive. The glass is never clean; a loose speck will always float inside the piece. The pursuit of perfection carves deep in my mind, but only in art, and only in a way. You could pick apart the technical details all day, but you can’t touch the embodiment of the concept or ensnare what birthed it. You can’t because I can’t. It’s not ours to keep.
Nothing pulls me into presence like art. It shows me that place is real, I want to be there more often, and I remember how. That’s the choice at the crossroads for all of us: where we want our minds to align. Right now, this very second, you are here. I don’t care why. That’s on you. But you’re here, and you’re looking for something, and I’m writing to tell you what I found. Maybe that’s why you came.
I’ve been deep in Boduf Songs lately: his lyrics, his compositions, his story. That man is a genius. I feel like I have him to myself, like a middle-schooler who just discovered Joy Division and wants to bury herself in it alone. Boduf Songs is my boyfriend, and I can take him everywhere. Like any schoolgirl crush, he doesn’t know I exist. That’s what we’re after: our most treasured secret.
Ideas and ideals, superficial things, and all the drugs, drink, and disaster that make it tolerable. At a point we coast on memory for the purity of heart. Once we discover its value, we sharpen weapons and build fortress after fortress to avoid a war that threatens its very existence. Our defenses are the true creation, because they’re what’s living us. They aren’t what I create. They’re what is created of me.
Look closely at the glass. There’s the speck I couldn’t catch, drifting inside of what I made. That’s the defense I can’t perfect, and it’s the only part of the piece that moves.
