My Life Inside of a Painting
If I were to get a diagnosis from someone professional I could only imagine how impressed they’d be. I would have spent the past hour mouth bone dry at this point repeating my symptoms over and over as if the redundancy of the words would help me understand myself better. I’d tell them about my fears, my anxieties, the way my heart trips over itself as I second guess every third word I speak in any social setting. I'd say intelligent things- words I learned from TikTok- emotional labor, anxious attachment, people-pleasing. Things that help my body fit into neat little boxes so that I might climb in and close the lid and somehow be okay with myself.
The prognosis would be underwhelming. I was simply a human being. I had trauma but every person carried unidentifiable scars around them from the battlefield of adolescence. No chemical imbalance for me. I just simultaneously wanted too much and too little. Wanted to live and to die in rapid succession, over and over again.
Predisposed to melancholy. A sick sort of enjoyment in the sharp stabbings of emotional turmoil. No one else in my family seemed to have it so it must not be genetic. Still, this yearning to feel everything so fiercely feels ancient — evolutionary almost. The curse of the creative individual. It must be our constant empathy, or our narcissistic need to relate everything to our own pain.
It leads to brooding. The longer I spend closing myself off to the world the more alienated my thoughts become. I wonder how I could simply detach myself from this plane of existence. Leave. Crawl out of the Hopper painting I currently find myself in, drag myself across the halls of the MoMA and enter blindly into a Matisse. Further abstract myself from this reality.
It’s not that I don’t love my Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but Mondays drag on and on and every time I send an email with one too many exclamation points some part of my small intestine shrivels up and dies.
No. I love it all, more or less.
But I love the terrible feeling of repeatedly asking myself ‘what’s the point’ too. Digging and poking at the bruise of my ego until I finally stand up and shout enough and get myself a coffee or a new book or wine to forget about the fact that I hate it, hate it here but love it too.
Life has never been easier. But we’re digging ourselves into holes we have no way of getting out of. Discovering new ways to feel awesome and inadequate at the same time. It feels wrong but there’s a nostalgia sitting in my stomach for a time when my base needs weren’t being met- when I had no time to dwell, or to think and overthink. I was content with scraps then. Now I’m rarely wholly happy at all.
Being 27 is no joke. We make ourselves miss the punchline, instead deciding to dissect and hypothesize the why of the innate sadness that sits inside ourselves. It’s a part of me too, and I’m sick of pretending it isn’t. Maybe I’ll always be lonely, but with that realization means that I’ll always be happy too.
Like two sides of the same coin my melancholy nestles firmly hand in hand with my elation. Every sunset brings the reminder that I’ll never see it again but also the thought that I did- that I was lucky enough to see it in the first place.
Now I stand in front of a woman undressing. A voyeur in the white-washed walls of the Museum of Modern Art. Her back is turned and you can’t see her face. In the turret across from her yellow light bleeds out the open window into the dark New York evening. Her curtain skitters across the stale wind. It’s all blurred around the edges, and you can’t see where her pale skin ends and the beige blank wall behind her begins. The air is so silent I will her to just get a move on already and turn around; beg her to look at me.
Around me are paintings significantly more colorful than this one. Ones with greater cosmic significance tied to them, or riots of color shouting to draw my attention. People rarely stop by this, it's little more than an empty room between the Picassos and the Dalis. I get it.
If only she would turn around, just so I could see the color of her eyes, or if she had developed wrinkles at the corner of her mouth from laughing too much, then I could move on.
She doesn’t, of course. She’s a painting. She’s in beautiful stasis, locked between one moment and the next for eternity until the dust mites come and swallow her whole. I’ll never know what she looks like- Hopper never actually wanted you to see his subjects, he only asked you to understand them.
For the briefest of moments, I wonder if there’s someone out there, looking in on me. Watching me with my back turned, asking me desperately to look back. To face them. I don’t turn around. I sigh and go find the Persistence of Memory.
