“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere” – Haruki Murakami

light only becomes visible, becomes real, once it collides and rebounds. while light travels, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. then, to be seen, for perpetuity, one must impact another. otherwise, you become a figment, liminal, only realized through the havoc left behind.

as i paint the landscapes of my travels, i recall some of my collisions, the only moments in my life i knew i meant something to someone. the only moments i became real: 

i. malibu, january, oil on wood, ‘three dolphins leap from the waves into a pink sun’:

we were walking along the coast, barefoot, the pacific’s blisteringly cold waves running over our feet. we were near tower eight when a bee, nestled in the grainy sand, stung the smallest toe on my right foot. it reminded me of when you ran through the broken glass bottles in the alleyway outside your apartment in only your socks, nostalgic of a child in a flowery meadow. the waves continued to swarm and ebb as we watched my blood wash into the ocean. he ran to the lifeguard for sting-kill to sedate the pain as you sat with me in the sand, unbothered by the chill of the salty wind, and we noticed how the seafoam coated the Point Dume cliffside. i preferred my lips sealed, i didn’t want to say a word. i didn’t want to break the comfortable silence, the semblance of peace, but you did:

‘your eyes look like the ocean’

i didn’t reply, but i thought your lipstick matched the sunset. in that moment, the dying bee still lodged in my foot, we understood eternity…when he returned, my skin discolored from the cold, my back burning from the support of your hand, my eyes unmoved as he kissed me, i wished he brought sting-kill for my heart as my bloody feet ran away from you, from home.

ii. new york, february, watercolors on canvas, ‘a sliced peach, dripping in honey on pink silk’: you told me as we went back to your place on St. Marks that you despised New York in february, that the city was thrown in a dreary black and white film. but not to paraphrase your eloquence, you more accurately shared:

‘winter in new york? yeah, she’s a bitch of a motherfucker.’ 

you always did have a way with words. 

yet, your apartment was an oven, warm and glowing, tarot cards strewn over pink bedsheets, one turned face up, beaconing. 

‘what does that one mean?’  

‘it means my boyfriend is shitty, it means act impulsively, it means you should…’ when you stopped letting the cards read you, you looked near-shattering. ‘it means i have no fucking clue, just, oh fuck —’

hours later, my back stinging with scratches, my eyes stone, gazing into nothingness, unable to see, i dreamed of fleeing down your fire escape, away from the city, from your too-warm silk bedsheets, from superstitious sex. towards an ether of salt waves crashing down, bellowing into a sea of infinity. tranquil alpine forest cathedrals — silent, at rest, stone. my arm around you stiffened, forming not the breadth of cloud blanket from the Rockies’ summits but the stained glass mosaic you wanted of me. 

staring through the pitch black at the dutch-angle to your fire escape ladder, desperate to understand materiality, sleepless, i wanted to scream, cry. dream, misdefined.

you couldn’t understand. you sighed through a smile:

‘god, i love tarot.’  

new york is so depressing.

iii. berlin, march, charcoal on wood, ‘a moth flies into the sun’:

there was a jazz combo at the bar playing Miles and Chick. you took the drink from my hand, your lips closing around the bottle rim, eyes boring a hole through me. 

‘can’t they learn how to play a damn rhythm, the g doesn’t place on three, it —’

‘shhh’ you put a finger to my lips.

i am a real pain in the ass. typical starving artist. beyond frustrated at the europeans’ terrible rhythm, haze on my senses, i caught the confident smugness of your lips — you knew you were effortlessly more important than the cacophony of the shitty broken samba in the background. more drunk than i would like to admit to, unacclimated to the twelve-percent abv beer you didn’t think twice of, in defiance, i bit your fingertip. you tasted like cigarettes and irish whiskey and sweat—discordant, utterly unamerican, addictive. 

i was used to being a particle of light. some apparition, trapped traveling invisibly towards earth’s undefined corners. to feeling opaque control, manifesting some hue of light i sought to become. but you were the sun, and morphed from a light into an icarian moth. a finger too close to the embers of a cigarette, burning yet intoxicated from each masochistic second in its presence, lungs ablaze. you should have burned through, no longer pleasing, like dozens of marlboros before you. but i could never travel far enough away. for you are always there, for there is always a sun. i resort to the world of shadows, shaped from silhouettes formed of your reflection on the moon, refracting gossamer clarity. understanding. definition. radiantly, luminously dull.

a return to what was, is, and always will be.

rebounding off-of, on-to. incandescently in-between.

yours. mine. nothing and no one. 

always.

light.