There came this point in painting where I forgot about the lines. In that moment,
everything changed. My brushes got bigger and bigger, my swatches of color more and
dense and less inter-related, less careful of where the marks should end.
And the art began to look like it actually meant something.
I am looking to forget the lines, but it is so difficult to leave them where they
should be; they are make-believe borders that our eyes create to separate the pieces of
the world we hold distinct.
You know where I am going with
this. I'm not talking about lines in paint anymore.
I am looking for the man with whom there are no lines. I am remembering the man
I started sleeping with at night, and how we never
ever ever once spoke of it when we weren't in the midst of it. I am remembering how
confining that line felt on my throat, and how much cheaper I and our speech started to
feel as they crept to the border, yet did not dare cross over. I am remembering the man
whose face got red and who nervously twitched when we started talking about our sex
lives, and how we let that topic fade away as quickly as it had come, never to be returned
to, lost in a pocket of space. And there was another line.
I am looking at you still, all the while that I am saying this. I am wondering in the
quiet places if we could build what I have been looking for. If we could hold our
separate pieces in bits and regions, sliding from one to the other as those
three-dimensional creatures we are. If we could play out our lives and our battle -- our
occasional beauties, even -- on a stage where chasms do not open up around the tiny
fissures, the minute spaces in between that hold us, bounded in our places forever. If we
could approach the uncomfortable places without needing to wonder if the lines will suck
us in till we are sinking down, unable to rise back to the surface, lost, behind a border
that need never have existed in the first place.