Compromise

Bryan's drawing, 2012

Bryan and I have been having trouble lately.

I have come to learn that relationships are like breathing.

In and out. Open and shut. Close and distant.

It's been a mad ride these past few days. We've been dumped at the bottom of the chasms of depression, and sailed the heights of new honeymoon-like bliss.
We danced around each other, each taking up the waltz in an ebb and flow of passivity and action.

Today we've compromised.

Today we put our frustrated little heads together and worked out a plan. I have my time, doing what I want to do with him (activities he dislikes, such as reading to him, or writing together), and he gets 4 solid, non-interrupted hours playing a video game I have no interest in. Everyday.

We made some together time, which was most important.

Tonight I wanted to draw with him. He drew a portrait of me that looks like time flowed backwards and I somehow got much older, but I love it. I discovered something I didn't know about him. He can put texture and emotion into a drawing. He had never opened up and exhibited this to me before. I feel a new connection.

Compromise is a key that unlocks a door of happiness and wonder. As a schizophrenic in a working relationship with a significant other, this is news to me. I've never had such consistency, such a willingness to let another in and be received in turn. I am proud of myself today. Hoorah!

Busy Work

I don't know what to say about this collage, except that it is not quite finished.

There are too many left over spaces, and my mind goes straight to them when in need of comfort from chaos or colour.

For weeks I have been feeling the constipated surge of energy that rattles under my fingers, bends my spine, and colours my eyes. It has been waiting to be let out. This evening, I took on a project of collage work. This one is probably my biggest yet, and as you can see, I've taken stuff from discarded poetry notebooks and sketch pads to adorn it ... along with some of the more classic art of others' (such as the painting "Climax", by Aubrey Beardsley (1893), and a photo of the famous Shiva sculpture).

I know it's a lot to take in at once! (Heh. Welcome to my brain.) So I've highlighted a few things for your amusement:
1)

I chose the dichotomies we humans live inside to represent my seemingly endless struggle with sane/insane, normal/abnormal value systems. It seems I am caught in this binary, like Jonah in the belly of the whale.

and
2)

The snazzy application of glittery butterflies, which signify metamorphosis and change.

It's now 2.13am, and I have reached my artistic limit. I cannot look at this with new eyes. Any suggestions on what might finish it?

Self-Misunderstandings

Speed Self-Portrait, 2012

Her face was a fist. It struck the gut of every stranger.

The tangled nest of her mind was a puzzle with no solution. Like a multi-tiered maze, it was paradoxical and led only in knots that frustrated any conversant. Combing it was as confounding as running fingers through wet, matted hair.

There were no outlets.

She ripped thoughts away from tangibility as though they were pages in a book. Chapters and chapters of unhappy endings tore to pieces, without even the satisfaction of the sound of tearing, or the clunk as they made their imaginary landings on the floors, the walls, the counter tops.

She was a mish-mash girl, invisible and strikingly obvious at the same time. She was always going in the wrong direction.

If time is a wire, supporting pin-ups of events like laundry in the minds of humans, she is certainly a spiral. She was a side-ways force no one can keep in the safety of boxes or definitions. Her thoughts and daydreams came and went as they pleased.

Ideas were tourists. They luxuriated on the chairs and divans in her hotel eyes, paid their fare, and made clean getaways through the highways of her lungs and the alleyways of her nostrils. Her breath came loudly, announcing their departure.

Her eyes warped from their darkness into a coffee stain. Her concentrated look was a spill, the liquid curved down at the edges of her mouth. Her face dripped its caffeine tears. She folded her smallness in half and hunched over the paper that was as crisp as her voice.

The miasmic world dissolved like sugar around her.

She picked her words from the piles among her feet, testing them, weighing them, and then setting them in order from lightest to heaviest on her page. It felt good to end her sentences with the force of an anvil.

With one heavy boulder of a line, whose scribbled face was as black as a burn, she concluded her constructions.

She weighted the edges so the whole epistle crumbled toward the bottom. The ink spots edged together like a crowd. Crumpled and used, the frailness of the elderly, yellow paper announced itself in her hands. Edge met edge.

Soft as a strand of hair, the beginnings sniffed at the stone ends. There was a crease, a folding of ideas as she smashed the lined poem together. It reached down and touched its toes, then carefully brought its arms together. Quartered, the weight entered her pocket, loving her hip the way no man would ever. It snuggled in warm as fingers.

The sun didn’t notice, and dripped down the already stained face of the sky.