Your Pain(ting)

Your Pain(ting) Part 1
I have a frame on the wall that only requires you to step into it, so that I can begin painting you with memories instead of colors. I will dip the brush inside of my first day of school, when I cried. It was ironic to weep about being left in an unfamiliar place when I was also terrified of going home. I was with my drug addicted and abusive father. He used to beat you in almost every memory I have of you. But you replaced the terror of that first day of school with a more impactful one. As you walked me to school on another day, you looked down at me and asked if your face looked okay. Your left eye was shut, black. But I did not hesitate to tell you that you looked fine. Whenever I think of your eyes, I think of a child lying to his mother. So I am painting them with a black color I have never had in my crayon box. I look just like you. That is what everyone has always told me. Your hair is jet-black and long, and what I remember about it is that you yelled at me once when I asked you who had cut it. You came home from the salon and were upset that it was so short. I thought the question safe, but your reaction was what ultimately made you unfamiliar to me. I simply wanted to know. And so when I pass the brush to capture the silkiness of your hair, there is an unfamiliar-black that highlights its significance in every stroke. I must practice this quite a bit because I was always afraid to touch it, and my hand still needs to become accustomed to this kind of familiarity. Your lips are full like mine. They have kissed me many times before going to bed and on my way out of the house. Yet what I feel when I paint them are words telling me you were leaving me with strangers. This was the most frightening moment I had ever experienced. I never knew how much I loved you until that moment. I never thought myself capable of reacting so strongly to anything you’ve ever said to me. But I did, and since then your lips have been frozen in time. I wish I had the perfect colors to capture them; a color that retains the natural red of their flesh, while giving them that asymmetrical shape when you would speak to me, and shading that will make your eyes fade like the background of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring.’ I would be proud of this effect if I could manage it, for it lessens the pain by pitting your eyes against your lips for attention. Because when your lips become overbearing, I can find some solace in your eyes and vice versa. I saw you once after years of estrangement. You were wearing a dress for the first time and I told you that you looked beautiful. You didn’t believe me but it was true. It was quite the contrast from the woman I remember beating me for refusing to call my stepfather “Dad”, or the woman standing over my baby brother while he gasped for air after she punched him in the stomach. She always wore jeans or shorts for those occasions. I don’t quite remember the details of her hands, whether they were soft and manicured. But I remember them, milky white, grinding against her denim crotch when I asked for a quarter to buy some chips. She mocked me by asking me if I expected her to get a fucking quarter by pulling money out of her pussy. The combination of these hues creates a color of vivid-awful that is on a different spectrum of the wavelengths of shame. It is a hue of memory that I do not wish on those who will contemplate your painting. But you must bear it.

Your Pain(ting) Part 2
I wish I did not have to paint your breasts, but I remember them hovering over the body of a beast while you thought I was sleeping. You looked over at me and we made eye contact. I quickly shut my eyes and opened them periodically, condemned to trying to understand what you were doing. I couldn’t see the body beneath you, but its claws would clasp your breasts as if trying to remove them and place them back onto your chest. I remember your entire body as you walked out of your room naked after having sex one midnight. You yelled at me and asked me what I was doing awake, when I should have asked you what you were doing walking around naked. Your body must be painted… No, it must be left out, so that when I look up at you I will experience a sense of aphasia and not of a phantom limb. I know that you believe that your sharp features should remain the same, and that the ways in which I have painted you do not resemble you. But since you will not have the difficult conversations, I must paint you with the depth and breadth of their sound, while making sure that the colors keep you silent and the shading makes you receptive, absorbing the light at the right angles so that you can reflect my words and pain at a sonic and chromatic pace. I have to put you in a frame because it’s the only way that I can get you to listen. Did you not hear me when I told my girlfriend’s father that she slapped me because I cursed, and that you were the only one that had a right to hit me. A right to hit me, Momma. A right. That’s what I said. You asked me if that was true when we were alone in the car and without looking at you I said “of course”. I said of course, Momma. I must put you in a frame so that you can be forced to listen to what all of those who love art will say and think of you, so that you can feel the cruelty of being judged by the creation of someone else. It is the only way to make you mine. It is the way you made me yours. You must put yourself into this frame and let me paint you, Momma. Because your nose and eyes and lips and ears and chin and hair and jaw are not the colors I see them. I must give you the contrast, tint, and sharpness of my memories. I must make you in the impressionism of expectations and separation anxiety. I must combine many colors of pain to capture the tension of your motherhood against your person. I want that to bleed through the canvas. I need that to bleed through the canvas, even if I have to dig into my veins to obtain the necessary paint. They say that a true artist makes the eyes appear as if they follow you wherever you stand, but I have yet to master that about you, Momma. Please, step into the frame.