I.
I am in fifth grade, and I have read all the books in my school’s library about Frida Kahlo. In her halo of flowers and vines, I see my own smudged marker drawings of ferns and petals. The monkeys on her shoulder lean into me so I can whisper in their ears. I admire the shadow over her upper lip as I trace where her eyebrows meet in the middle. Her intentional etching contrasts my blurred self portraits, where sloppy pools of graphite reveal where I contemplated changing my features.
My mom is finally letting me wax my lip and the fuzz between my eyebrows. I can’t wait because I’m tired of these two blonde girls coming up to me chanting “mustache” with their index fingers beneath their noses. When I touch the channel between my eyebrows, the hairs recoil like the wiry legs of an ant just squashed. I think the hairs make my face look dirty.
After school, I spread my markers around my lavender leather-bound sketchbook at the kitchen table. I draw dresses on wire hangers dangling off a clothesline tied between neighboring roofs. The buildings lean to the right, the gray skies especially hollow. My mom tells me my drawing looks good, but I tell her it doesn’t count because I’m basically copying Frida Kahlo. She says it’s fine because artists copy other artists all the time.
II.
I’m a junior in high school when I hear “33 GOD” by Bon Iver for the first time. The song is about being forgotten by God, about some test of faith. The music reaches a crescendo, the layers of sampling crumble away. I don’t recognize the pieces when they scatter, and I don’t see God.
I hear an anthology of nights before I was eighteen. I press repeat and empty boxes from my closet over the floor, sliding old books around the hardwood to find the creased leather journal I once said I would write poems in.
I am climbing onto a stripped wood porch. The peeling paint is warm, I avoid where the wood has been torn. My short fingers grip a glass cup of lemonade, slam it down on the picnic table, and pivot to jump off the deck into the tall grass. I bend over and yank dandelions from the ground. I run after her toward the old cemetery at the treeline. I admire her blonde hair, the breeze’s marionette. We are ten years old, barefoot in the weeds, and I think we will be friends forever.
Several Junes later, I sit on a wooden bench in the park on the hill. I sit next to my boyfriend at the time, our heads tilted backwards trying to pick out a third star from the clouded sky while raindrops hit our eyelashes. I like that he’s much taller than me. When I stand next to other girls in my grade I feel huge. I just got back from Montana where the water was aqua and there was snow on the ground. I was thinking about him most of the time. I lean in and kiss him in the rain.
I usually let my friends drive because I’ve crashed my car twice. We drive to the beach with the windows down, smoke curls around the glass edge. The music sighs, the lighter gasps. Later we will stop at the gas station on the corner, walking back down the tree-lined streets to crowd her bathroom mirror before we leave the house. There will be just enough bodies around me that I can only sway. We will come back home and sit on the couch in the living room and talk about the different places we will be in three months.
I scribble 33 GOD – A Tribute to Fear at the top of the page and close the journal. My words tethered to a song like my sketches were copied from paintings. I wonder if I’ve aged out of response art.
III.
I rarely walk through museums, but when I do only the morbid pieces keep my attention. Pointed bones, a skeletal floor of rocks. Tiger skin stretches across the floor and live birds escape the remains. Gelatinous spirits, black and white.
I exit the elevator at the fifth floor. She is the second or third piece I see, sitting in a yellow chair in a navy blazer, with locks of hair scattered across the floor, reaching for the edges of the canvas. Her eyes rest underneath her dark brow, bent like a seagull flying far into the sky.
Sole Magazine