something(s) Borrowed, Some Thing(s) blue

Catch a glimpse of Forever, baby.

I had a vision that we built a tower from all the clutter in The Closet. A miniature, a trinket, a talisman. The grey stones in your grey garden. Mismatched socks and bronzed baby shoes. Flags and tags and birthday cards. Our Father’s scritch-scratched records. Black-and-white yearbooks.

They say that the secret to sustainability is what’s already in your stock. How would the climate change if we remembered the preciousness of pre-loved artifacts (the preciousness of people, for that matter) and the sturdiness of slowly-made stuffs?

(You’re sturdy, you know. Strong, you know. And steady, too.)

To take each other into the eternities, we now pay our penance of tiny perfect things, blue and borrowed. We lay our old aches onto the altar and walk, hand-in-hand, beside each other wearing brand new shoes (red, for dancing, shared between Brides).

My grandmother told my mother and my mother told my Sister and me that “No thing lasts forever”

So now, I’m confessing to you that I hold onto it All, because it’s Everything I can do to keep you Now, to keep you Close. They say ‘you can’t take it with you.’ Well, I wish you hadn’t left, but I’m glad you left This All behind.

It’s so easy to get lost in Eternity!

We plastic-wrap our memories, and photograph our feelings, and build our lives into shadow boxes. Because memory is fickle, but art? Art is… art is forgiving. Earth into clay into crooked, well-loved mugs. Water into washes into hues into shapes that spread onto the canvas which hangs on the wall where the light hits just right.

We check out love letters at the library,

we carry dog-eared sketchbooks to the pub,

and of course we play the same records for the same people again and again and to remind them that we never stopped thinking of what we built together,

even when they went Far Away.

Even the stars line-up once in a while for a gallery show, once in a while.

And My life with You will always be a collage, a vision board, a hodge, a podge, a mix-and-match of patterns and prints and plotlines. An impression of impressions we had, that we made.

A kaleidoscope of moments and of memories.

A rainbow.

Every One an artist, a collector of Nows, of Thens.