Sometimes, maybe when I’ve been exposed to beauty, I feel such an aching fullness. A hope. Thick and real. Like something sticky and fleeting like it’s dripping through your fingers, and you can’t quite hold it but some of the residue is left on your hand. Driving through Roses Valley- all the doors. Metal with designs. Layer upon layer of paint. So many stories behind each closed door. Each curve. Each woman standing in her threshold. Sweeping out. Watching all the cars go by. Full of tourists. Full of gawkers. I want to paint these women…all their eyes so full of fluid light. The wrinkles. They seem like wise women, like they have some sort of magic I want to know about hidden behind their slight smiles. I want to paint them. Juicy, oil- turpentine smell in the apartment I don’t yet have. The real artist space I’ve longed for my lifetime. Brushes in jars. Light coming in just so. My hair half-crazy and tied up. More ideas swirling around like dust motes in the sun than is possible to nail down. I want to capture the doors, the passageways. The women in the thresholds to their spaces. Their worlds- so many untold stories. And yet all our stories are the same. Our hearts ache in the same language. For the same things. I wonder how many other people feel homesick in the same way I do. I am homesick for all the people I’ve yet to be. As though I can see them all standing in a line, on a dirt road waiting to meet me. And I can’t get to them fast enough. Because I must have this version of myself first. I must lay the foundations and the parts for each next me to be able to come forward.
I’m also homesick for the wild and the stars. The dirt devils. The mirages and the knowledge that just beyond the horizon is a line of camels. Slowly. Languidly. Waltzing their way across the dunes. Their oversized plush feel puffing the sand. The hind leg stepping exactly into the print the front foot made. Marching from nowhere into nowhere, but it’s all the center of everywhere. It’s all home. The moon rising over the dunes. Racing alongside the car as we speed through the desert. The mountains ticking beside us like clips from a film reel. The whole time the huge glowing moon keeping pace with our speed. Hand out the window catching the wind.
