The day I swiped on you: I knew that you had swiped right on me. It’s a visual prowess. Everyone has it. Our ability to recognize patterns in a blurry picture and match it with a sharper reality. So yes I knew already, we were going to be a match. Who was I, back then? I had barely scratched the surface of what my emotional and physical needs were. But, my heart had been bearing a romantic potential, for a long time. I ruminated, for what felt like hours, at the choice: left or right. Who am I now? Now that we have parted ways, for better or worse.
The springtime of newfound love: I’d happily live in its nostalgia if I could. We started to talk, I was cheesy and you were you, and we lived a college romance. We shared spaces, insecurities, food, alcohol, smoke, poems, and kisses. I did not know I was capable of such an experiences of love. I accept it. But before we marvel at this shared wonder we reached at, know that, we looked for what we CAN accept. We compared it to what we had accepted in our pasts, and played in the hands of our desires to make a paining of love that we, together accepted. I loved that initial painting of romance that we made together. Beginner’s luck. But slowly, cold winter arrived. Dark, wet, and runny colors started to appear through the hard bright ones. And we smudged them. Over and over. Egoistically.
I should’ve paid more attention to colors. I should’ve been kinder. When did we start adding salt and water to them? They absorbed more moisture over time. So did your eyes. Only to mobilize and run across length of the canvas and make the dry ones weep. I was a snob and a perfectionist and I could not bear the sight of these smudges. They cried to me, “I know you’re going to abandon the painting mid way, you think its ruined.” I resisted the immediate urge but it called out to me so much that I couldn’t bear but leave it. Dissatisfied.
Now what do I do of the phantom brush that I hold. A brush that lingers to touch the canvas of our love. But I’m also afraid, if I look for your hand, it’d just smudge over badly over a painting we already worked. Yet it keeps reappearing in me with all its weight, salt, and dry colors in its hair strands. There are days like these where I can’t bear it any more and miss your hands.
What kind of questions does one ask when they look at a paining? Does it feel complete? What does it instill in us? What were the artists thinking?
But you must also remember, that I dropped the brush that we both held, hand over hand. Now, its not just the burden of an unfinished painting. It is I who chose to stop painting. A choice of privilege in the face of struggle to paint better. If I had the privilege to find a new canvas, a new brush, a new inspiration, and a new tool or hand to work with, it might’ve been easier. These hands long for your hands every time I think of a canvas. Perhaps, someday we will be atoned of our hands, become a canvas ourselves at some place, some time, and for someone new.
But until then, what would you think of the painting we made if you saw it a gallery? A post-modern gallery, perhaps?