A Message from a Dream, a Note to the Girl and the Woman I Have Been and Am
Shelves of sketchbooks. Big ones. Little ones. Spiral-bound, hardbound, softbound. Papers sticking out from the edges. Receipts. Leaves. Scraps. Half-finished things.
A lifetime of thoughts.
A lifetime of trying.
From girlhood to womanhood. Her whole life.
But the artist, the writer, the creative woman was supposed to sit down and write an ordinary thank-you note.
Or a regular birthday card.
Or was it an apology?
Something for another someone who lived a recognizable life in a recognizable house and did the recognizable things people did. Someone who didn’t read poetry or wander through galleries or fill shelves with notebooks. Another someone who had gotten older and older and older without seeming to want much more than what she already had.
The artist, the writer, the creative had tried for something more.
But right now she wrote—
Thank you for—
Happy birthday to—
I’m sorry for—
She tried to write the acceptable words of communication in her boxy little room with the skylight shining and her hallway with shelves of sketchbooks. Her hopes and dreams hanging on nails on the walls. Dream until you Dreams come true scrawled across the wall. A message to wake up to. Year after year. Day after day. As she got older and older. Letters three feet tall. Lit diagonally by the sun every day.
But right now, she had a piece of ordinary paper and was trying to write the recognizable thing.
The small paper bridges people were supposed to pass between one another.
But instead, she had been drawing. She unfolded the page. It was much bigger. It wanted to be framed and hung. It was not a letter.
She had drawn a city scape in pen and ink, tall and crowded and angled toward the ground. A view from above. A bird’s-eye view from a storm cloud.
At the top right was a nest.
It was made of sticks and mess.
Falling from it—jumping from it—was a fledgling.
A blue-black, shiny inked form.
A girl.
A woman.
A bird.
A partially formed angel.
Falling diagonally through the city toward the lower left corner of the page, where the city disappeared into the distance.
As from above, so as below.
Life and death disappearing in the distance and in the beginning.
Invisible.
The partially formed woman-bird-angel-artist fell or flew through it all.
Buildings stretched, bent, and narrowed. Windows became scratches. Impressions of lives being lived. The streets disappeared before they could quite become streets.
The viewer was falling from the clouds with the girl.
Down.
Down.
Down.
There was nothing to grab onto.
There were no trees to land in.
Shoot for the moon and land among the stars?
No.
This was falling.
Failing to fly.
Falling through light and reflection and concrete and shadows.
And worked into the shadows, the crosshatching, the dimensions of the buildings, were the words:
I TRIED HARD.
I tried.
I tried hard.
I tried.
I tried hard.
The artist held the paper in her hands and felt the strange weightlessness of the falling girl.
The weakness in her own arms.
She knew not even to hold them out to catch herself.
She was falling like a stone.
The girl, the woman, the artist, the creative hadn’t had enough.
Not enough of whatever that city required for her to fly.
Or even glide.
The wings or sails she needed were different things.
Not the right credentials.
Not the right connections.
Not the right shape of ambition.
Not the right talent.
Not the right politics.
She had been born without wings even to glide down on.
No parachute.
Falling like a stone.
A shiny obsidian stone, curled up now, tired of trying to fly or guide herself.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling toward an invisible end.
The artist, the writer, the creative had only been a woman all along who wanted to make things.
A woman who kept filling sketchbooks.
Sketchbooks that didn’t become art shows.
Pages that didn’t become novels.
An ordinary, regular woman who tried to fly.
And fell instead.
Across the city, hidden in ink and crosshatched shading:
I TRIED.
I TRIED.
I TRIED HARD.
XOXOXO
XOXOXO
XOXOXO
XOXOXO
XOXOXO
I had sat down in my dream thinking I owed someone else a regular message—a thank-you, a birthday wish, an apology, one of those little socially recognizable exchanges. I’d write something cute. I’d write something clever. A play on words someone would maybe, possibly notice but likely would not.
But the page in the dream didn’t cooperate as I woke.
Instead, I made the thing I have always made when language got too small: art.
And the message is not really to the other person at all.
As my brain wrestled to go from sleep and dream to wakefulness, the page expanded in meaning and intent.
It was a message to the girl, the young woman, I was in a messy nest.
It was to the woman falling through the other’s architectures.
It was to the older artist writer waking and still holding the paper.
It was to all of them and to me.
I TRIED HARD.
Not as an excuse. Not even as a plea. Recognition.
I see what I did.
I see how long I kept going.
I see the shelves.
I see the years.
I see what didn’t happen, too.
Falling through other people’s architectures.
The art life didn’t happen while I was making the art.
No gallery required in that moment. No gallery room awaiting.
No novel contract. No agent. No publishing house.
Writing without approval and permission.
No approval or permission or witness from other people’s architecture.
I wanted to write somebody else a card and accidentally made myself a witness to myself.
That’s why the XOXOXO works so well to me now. It isn’t ironic anymore.
It’s the signature on the note to myself.
Who I’ve been talking to all along.
XOXO
