An overgrown forest - awake with every breed of twisted, haunting wood - trees lean inwards at sharp angles, branches outstretched like knotted withered hands casting thick shadows - pouring in from all sides with unnerving solidity - a cluster of spring flowers -  radiant shades of purple and blue - blossoms like a wildfire in a strangled halo of white-gold sunshine.

It’s been a long time since Minerva’s been willing, as the quote says - since the muses have come to visit of their own volition. Technically, there are no muses for visual art, other than Terpsichore. Still, I find the concept poetic.

Setting the clean canvas on its perch, I dry my hands on my dirty jeans and grab my phone from the coffee table. I find that picture of the chickadee in my chat history and study it carefully, one hand stroking an imaginary beard. It’s way too blurry for hyper-realism, all the details smeared and slurried into hazy suggestions of light and shadow, body, and fullness - which are only synonyms when we talk flavor, the superficial. 

Impressionism it is, I guess.

It’s necessary at this stage to keep the body numb, lest the pain trigger spasms, or seizures, raging against the pain. Turbulence at this level, when you’ve broken this much, sunk this far, would seal your fate.

I’m trying to count sheep, or do something else equally boring, going off on a tedious train of thought that can lull my consciousness into that state of extreme, mindless drivel that would put me to sleep, instead, I keep going off on rabbit trails.

Inspiration drowns the melatonin - visions of beauty - and memory drowns the visions - beautiful ugly - just plain ugly, more often than not.

I see the first room I ever had to myself, in that studio apartment I rented from the time I was a sophomore in college until the spring of my junior year - the one with the spiders in the walls.

I see the first buds of springtime, pregnant with dew, bursting rainbows at the seams - red oceans of clouds phasing through the ruddy tint of a wineglass window -  leaving the bloodstains behind as they push their way through the crystal walls. Clean white versions of them rest easy on either side of the tragedy, ‘phasing through phases’ with an ease that the strongest bodies would envy. I’m not one of them.

It’s nearly 2 a.m. I’m going to be so tired in the morning. Technically, it’s already morning, I know. I’m going to be so tired when the clock tells me it’s time to pretend to try to live another day. 

I’m going to see Kattar in the afternoon. 

I haven’t visited him nearly enough since the accident, and I’m worried he’ll think that I’m angry with him. It’s harder than it oughta be - to force myself out of the house and go keep him company.

I say it’s because of the cold, and the distance when anybody never asks - When I’m tired of lying, I admit it’s because I’m a selfish little jerk - and there are some things that I really don’t want to know. A whole lot I don’t wanna see.

I found another scar - high up on my back, running between my shoulder blades in a long vertical snake, like a crooked mountain range on a topographical map. I follow it to its furthest edge, feeling it vanish at the ends of my fingertips back into smooth, unbroken skin. But it’s enough to ruin the whole picture, like an off-color streak where the cheap paint flaunts its flaws, defiling the picturesque with its boldfaced imperfection.

I think of the half-finished chickadee, standing with her skeleton, pencil-sketched wings outspread like a tiny jet plane, with no eyes, and only the shaky idea of a beak, in faint hairline cracks made of graphite.

Tribes of butterflies sifting from the sky like painted snow to light on the red-faced posies dancing in the grass. Flocks of white birds flying south for the winter - their reflections falling softly on the little pond by the city park with the swings gutted out and the seesaw frosted over.

I thought I’d give it a go, just as a challenge, since I did the peony - maybe I’d make a ‘thing’ out of it. I haven’t tried to make paintings in a series with any kind of continuous theme since the breakup, last April.

Raindrops sliding down the window, turning the world outside into a landscape of wriggling abstract nouns. Fingers of feathered frost creeping from the bottom up the glass, turning the world inside into a toasty cage.

Back then I was doing an entire collection based on my boyfriend Etan’s big project “Colored Girls Only.” He wouldn’t let anyone help him pick the sets, or the dresses and decorations for each model, because it ‘had to be perfect,' but after he photographed each model, he’d give me a dozen or so of the best pictures from the photoshoot, and I’d choose my favorite to remake in acrylic or watercolor.

We never agreed on matters of preference, when it came to the arts. The orange girl was the prettiest in my opinion. I remember the way her sun-bleached hair echoed shades of red and bronze from the setting sun, pouring through the bitter orange leaves, adorning the ends of the kinky coils like threads of spun gold. I was jealous when I laid eyes on her the first time, with her smooth dark skin like a chocolate angel from an artisan confectionary, so rich that it shimmered, and slanted eyes, razor-sharp, blue as the sky. I wonder how much time God spent crafting the delicate lines, the precise angles that instilled so much power into that gaze - how many times he had to erase, go back, and realign before he could consider his masterpiece complete. “Orange Tinted Maiden” was the first of my works that ever scared me. I was daunted, almost paralyzed, by the idea that I could never do that beauty justice.

Etan couldn’t stand that assignment. He hated working with warm tones - probably always will, thanks to me. But the magazine that commissioned him wanted one shoot for every shade of the rainbow, and he used to complain, volubly, about ‘too many hands in the pot,’ and not being allowed to stick to his ‘vision.’

He was angry beyond words when I suggested he make the best of it, and told me I didn’t understand art. I wish I had had something savage to fire back - but I never did - I’ve never been any good at making decisions in the moment, and always just…live to regret them - to regret doing nothing. When he asked me to model for the last shoot, in the red dress-

-Not now. 

I squeeze my eyes shut and take a deep breath, trying to exhale the memory, knowing that if I don’t, I’ll have a terrible night of it. I’m so done crying myself to sleep every night.

I glance around the room for something that doesn’t hint toward something I don’t want to remember. Is it possible to have belongings without memories? Nothing goes through life without picking up some traces of a story.

With a sigh I turn my face to the ceiling, studying the dots that make up a week of Kattar’s life that I wasted - one of many - forcing him to be a part of one of my hair-brained endeavors - scrubbing the fingerprints out of the surface so the mural could start life with a clean slate - changing the water when it was too thick with paint to use to clean my brushes anymore -

For what it’s worth, I asked Etan to help me first, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was too glamorous for manual labor and too busy with pretty work to be part of all the dirty, grueling parts of my life.

I can’t explain how angry he was when he found out that Kattar had helped me. Clean the stupid walls.

He honestly would have preferred I did the whole thing by myself rather than have Kattar involved, and that made me so angry I stayed quiet, as always.

I figured I was tolerant enough of all the steps needed to make his ‘visions’ a reality - days and days of styling pretty strangers and pouring over their photos until they were irresistible enough for billboards and magazine covers.

I wasn’t the one who never wanted him around while I was working. I wouldn’t have cared if he joined us in our crazy little project. I was the reason they met in the first place, though that was a big mistake.

Etan and I had been together for 2 months at that time, and he finally had a weekend to spare for me. We were supposed to go visit the new art gallery opening in the city center, the ‘artsy district’ next to Kattar’s and my alma mater. The brochures announced that they had a whole pastel-on canvas collection inspired by Precioso Vegerra’s incredible ‘Muse in the Puddle,’ and I knew it would haunt me to my dying day, and maybe after, if I didn’t get to see it at least once, though the tickets were crazy expensive. I actually paid for Etan’s ticket so he would have no excuse not to come. Kattar paid for his own. Neither of them cared that much about paintings, but I insisted on dragging both of them to the grand opening with me because I just couldn’t decide whether I would rather go with my best friend or my boyfriend. I should have picked one.

Two brown hands parting from a grasp - the fingers, once melted together, growing thin in the space where they separate - like fragile, gossamer strands of destiny, stretched to the breaking point.