Rahul gave me paint today. The oil kind. I haven’t painted since I was in high school, and even then I wasn’t very good. But it was fun, I do remember that. I decided to start with blue. I don’t know why. Maybe it just felt right, maybe I was thinking about the ocean.
So, I squeezed some blue onto my palette and swirled my brush in it, wondering how to turn this into an angry sea across the blank space in front of me. But the water in my head kept moving, and refused to let me capture it. It swerved from green to blue to something in between, as if daring me to make such an easy move. I couldn’t. So I kept swirling my brush, and eventually the little blob turned flat and lost it’s use.
I looked down at it. At the way the color had spread out and taken some sort of life in it’s sacrifice. How the edges blurred, and the brush had ridged it’s middle. As if to say, even if you try you can’t waste me. I will be beautiful. And that made me want to layer it with some green. A touch of forest. A touch of weed. Just to see what would happen. I created a monster, in that mix. It fought valiantly, but it was doomed. In my mind, I had imagined a masterpiece. In my head, I imagine many things.
Then, I had some romantic notion to create living rock. To pour out the black tube, and stab it with the bristles. To lift it in anger from the canvas. To have it raised and sharpened, so it would cut my fingers. Except then, I didn’t leave the paint to dry. So it smudged flat when I touched it. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t do it. I had no aptitude for this creation.
It reminded me of a time in grade eight science class. My teacher had handed out blank paper to all us students and asked us all to write one paragraph about water. It didn’t even occur to me that this was science. As soon as she said write, I got so excited that I made it all up. Some longing, loving description of the ocean that twinkled across the park. That’s where I grew up, by the way. A city by the water. A feature in my life. So, that’s what I wrote about. And she collected all the pieces and spent a little while reading them while we watched. Eventually, she turned to us and said nobody understood the assignment but one. The one who wrote about water and not technical jargon. See, everyone had been writing about the formula, and I’d been writing love. And now I’m staring at my canvas. Trying to mix these colors and figure it out, the science behind turning this blank white into art.
The same way I try to figure out the way I feel about Tom.
