The great escape

After the passing of a friend I found myself frazzled. What I thought was pathetic attempts at art only served as presents until then, but I spread out magazines and clippings across my living room floor in a frantic attempt at gathering my thoughts, or perhaps finding them. I began cutting things, lighting cigarette after cigarette, gluing them together in the sequence of time like I did with the paper in my hands to find purpose. I certainly wasn’t aware, but it was there; it was there in the glue much like it was there in the cuttings and the sentences I couldn’t yet speak; I miss you, where are you, why did you leave? Where can I find you?

He had left me with one of the greatest gifts of all, which was the need to explore myself in such a way that I could feel like my body was truly my home. Little by little, art crept in under my bedroom door as I slept, and I dreamt dreams in which I built houses out of paper. Building new sentences via written structures by people who died long before I came to be, cutting up books that made me feel whatever I didn’t want to or I didn’t agree with. I did find a self there, disheveled and lost, but myself none the less.

This artform wasn’t intimidating, there was no one to tell me I was out of my depths there, and my flatmates watched, probably as worried as they were intrigued. Who could tell me that I didn’t have the right to use a pair of scissors and a discarded magazine to make purpose out of the hopelessness that is grief?

Time passed, and I moved north; winter froze me, as it always has. My cuttings always travelled in my hand luggage, the thought of losing them is not one I like going near. I would get unwanted books and magazines only to lock myself in to create little portfolios of possible worlds I could build and dream of. They were elsewhere, never near, and out of what I knew as danger. I spent hours watching videos detailing explorations of abandoned structures as I cut shapes and silhouettes and photos of people who had aged 40 years since that particular publication was made. I referred to myself as Pompeii, and I built a castle to protect the destruction I thought I had caused just by being.

Little by little the pieces talked back, as my hands got stronger and stopped cramping at hour 3 of cutting tiny fragments of bone from a photo of an archeologists findings in 1963.

I met her. Art became possibility now; it was no longer my love song to the shame I felt baptized in. I didn’t want to follow him beyond this world anymore, and I realized that my death wouldn’t equalize the pain of his, only echo it.

She would sit with me for hours, drawing next to my busy hands as we watched Goosebumps in the closed café where she worked until 4 in the morning. Her colleagues joined us, turned into allies and comrades. I would glue paper to paper and build little worlds where we all remained, happy and safe, able to create whatever needed to exist. With that, my friend didn’t feel dead any longer. He was right there in the room with us, his hand on my shoulder, whispering “I told you so” enough times for me to actually listen to his voice carried on the sound of my relentless cutting. The narratives that turned out to be lies began to fall away, and I realized that the light was only shameful in a world where I was unwanted.

Years later I found myself once almost able to pay my rent in full with the proceeds of the prints of my art, and as incredible and surreal as that felt nothing will ever be more important than how it all came to me. The only thing that isn’t borrowed is love and collages have become snapshots of memories of all kinds, whether painful, bittersweet or overwhelmingly happy. There is little to be remembered where there isn’t love, at the end of the day, and it cannot be disguised.

I know that my friend never left because of art. I know that I am loved because of art, too. “Her”, she, eventually became my wife and she buys me specialty scissors, scalpels and knives to ensure that I have the best time doing this because if it is important to me, it is important to her. It does not need to be a career path, it can merely be the expression of my existence. That too, is important, I have learned.

This craft entered my life like an emergency current, my own beings last attempt at letting me know that I should stay. It remains in my life a purpose and the proof that nothing has to belong to me or come only from me to be for me. Everything can be taught, learned and utilized to create the greater good and the greater good can only be good. A reminder that life is fleeting at best, and that the best I can do is be kind in this world.

If energy can never be destroyed or created, all the versions of me still exist, and my friend never left. I will never tire of the voice of my scissors and all the conversations its existence allows me to catch up on, even with those who are no longer here. This craft belongs to me, the wind and every being that has ever been here, just like this earth; expression is love incarnate.