I've Been Painting

Before I reach for another tissue, let me explain why my fingers are splashed and splotted and dotted with black spots. I'm sick with the flu. And I've spent the last three days, since my fever broke, grumbling under the lingering ache and fatigue of the virus. Every morning, I've struggled awake, one leg still stuck in the hammock of dreams, and rolled out of the covers, trying to breathe through a clotted nose. Throat scratchy and on fire. Mind a foggy dome of NyQuil stupor. I look in the mirror at a frizzy, brown head. Never get a haircut under the influence of antihistamines, I think and flip the new bangs with my fingers.


I swallow my pill and shove down breakfast: a big bowl of too much shredded wheat and a sliced banana, and one mug of black tea. For a few moments, I gaze at our newly dug vegetable garden, huddled in the grassy ground above the septic tank. The romaine lettuce isn't wilting anymore. Normally, on a day when walking from couch to kitchen doesn't leave me breathless, I'd clean or worry or go for a walk or try to read but worry instead. Today, however, I don't care how many cookies I eat or how long my ass stays plastered to the couch. I'm sick, and I'm sitting all day. No question about it.


After the first two days of fever have passed, however, that energetic itch is scratching at my body to GO GO GO!!! I try to clean but collapse. I try to worry but don't care. I try to go for a walk... no, I don't. I don't try to go for a walk. The sun is out and I can already feel my organs boiling over with fever again. Regardless, my mind needs something to wrap itself in for a few hours. Something slow. Something easy. Oddly enough, I don't feel like writing. It's painting I want. I want brushes. I want watercolors. The last time I poured over a piece of artwork for five hours was four winters ago, when it was too cold and too deep to venture outside. Now, on a warm day with trees frisky in the wind, one which I'd usually partake in, I'm at the table surrounded by paint brushes, cups of water, white trays stained rainbow, sheets of spread newspaper, pencils, and two old erasers.


First, I sketch and erase. Sketch and erase. Sketch and erase until a dim, graphite figure is stretched out over the rough paper and I'm ready to stain her body blue, and the liquid sheet wrapping around her hips, orange. There are seven different brushes, all with translucent red handles that remind me of candy, spread out over the newspaper, each tipped with different size bristles. Some are fat and long. Others are the size of a single flax seed. Two are shaped like raindrops.


The first layer is the easiest, and I'm sitting normal at the table, with an almost-straight back, clutching a long-handled, fat-headed brush. My arm moves quickly. Thoughts skip around in my head like a flat stone over water. I get up to pee or latch Elmer to his lead or drink orange juice. On the second layer, however, my eyes must become more intimate with the page. I'm stooped low over the table with a finer brush. My fingers rest on the thin handle with precision. Arm moves slow over the dampening figure. The paper goes limp with dampness. It curls as water evaporates. I grumble when my bladder tells me to go the bathroom. The third layer is for shadowing and depth and dimension. My eyes go blurry, but I blink, rub my aching neck, and continue adding roundness to the left arm.

Time drops by. Eventually, adding layers and shape and perspective to the figure doesn't matter. The piece becomes less of a painting and more of a being. A living song. Warm flesh with a past and future. Something that breathes and moves when I lean close to smear shadows between her fingers. I'm lost in this growing figure, speaking to her, touching each curve of her body with streaks of color as thin as feather quills. I discover magic when I line the purple body with black acrylic paint, and I realize it's been too long since I last felt this power.

In the rush of life, a place where my real body must be carefully fed, exercised, cleansed, and perfected, where deadlines force my writing to grow faster than it wants to, and where schedules and routine build walls and canyons between me and my desires, this week with the flu has kept me moving slow. It's kept me home with nothing to do but shake free the knots of my cobwebbed mind and explore it. Simplicity isn't what I normally strive for. It's what I'm afraid of. My whole life, I've been taught that nothing is simple. Everything is a challenge. I must work hard to fulfill my desire to be a writer and an artist, toiling over pen and paper until an entire day is exhausted under the weight of my strain.

But during these last three days, couch-ridden and stuck at the dining room table with a pad of 90 lb Canson watercolor paper, I've learned that none of this is true. Today, I painted a woman, a simple, purple woman cupping a yellow sun in her hands. Yes, I focused and measured, erased and painted over, cursed and sneered, but in the end, when she was finished, I realized I'd moved slow. I simmered. I relished the smell of water, the feel of acrylic spots drying to my skin, the page corners curling against my palms. Each second lingered. Ginger snaps never tasted better. Work didn't call me in. My father came home and convinced me to stroll through the woods, un-rushed. Life felt long and full and slow. Like it would last forever. As if I had forever. I loved the way I created, and I loved the way my body fit perfectly into the figure I painted, the one with black splotches on her hands.