Come, Spring
And so it’s time to go
I want to tell you an honest story. There are a thousand places I can start from, so I’ll begin at the time this journal here began. It was almost three years ago. I had just left a man I’d loved for five years and there was nothing left of myself in me. I’d let him become everything, and I was, in every sense, nothing without him.
I couldn’t have loved any other way, not then. A boy like him, who still had so much to learn about love (and knowing him, may never learn) had found someone who was much more like a girl than a grown woman who can challenge him and hold him to higher standard of love. She’d never been touched or held or spoken softly to. Nobody had surprised her with anything, nobody had fought for her. All she knew of love was that it was fleeting, chaotic, messy, and necessarily painful, and he came offering exactly this kind of love.
So here comes this beautiful, crazy man out of these white mountains in Palestine, with long lashes and a curl falling over his forehead, saying he wants me. I couldn’t understand why he did. And now I know that it’s our not understanding why we are wanted that makes us so undesireable with time. If we can’t understand what on earth the other sees in us, we are and will always be shadow lovers with nothing to give. We can’t hold love when we think it’s only come to us by mistake. If you love me, and I can see the reasons for your love, then I can offer them to you generously. But if I can’t understand, and you still insist on loving me, wouldn’t that be exhausting for the both of us? You’ll go on trying, and I’ll go on resisting, and your hands and mine will stay empty. In the end, you start to see me as the nothing I told you I was, or you give up trying to make me see the everything that I am. Your love will end, just like I’d said it would, and I’d never know I had anything to do with it. All I’d know is that it happened just like I’d predicted it would, and that you’d broken your promise. Only now I can see my part in all of this..
And so the story begins with this woman in an old white ford with the faded letters “Florida blood” on the side, driving her way out of the long, endless body of Florida, and him. The further she goes, the less of him she carries in her. But it takes a long, long time, years in fact, for all of him to leave her.
She works on her freedom, works on her heart. She travels to a little wild island and lives there for a few months, sorting through her pain, experimenting as an artist, discovering that she loves, just loves this kind of life and this kind of art and that kind of man. She wakes up every morning to the sound of the same rooster outside her window, begging for breakfast. She gets up at 7, feeds him and all his women, makes coffee for herself, walks by the esplanade. She goes down to the water to collect shells for the scarf she’s working on. She sits to talk with an older man who puts on a security shirt each morning and walks up and down the esplanade for hours, though no one pays him to. She goes to sit by the same log each morning, where the same lizard comes out to watch her everytime. Somedays she goes by the grocery store and picks up a little bottle of glue, or another a sewing kit. Then she goes back to paint and to make stuff, and the hens come to sit with her. Eventually she falls in love with a very different kind of man, different for all the ways she’s known except like the rest of them, he turns out to be emotionally unavailable and easily overwhelmed and that’s when she realizes it’s time to leave.
She returns to D.C. and promises herself it’s only temporary. She goes on nursing her heartbreak, meets a photographer in New York who speaks to her over the phone for hours each evening. She dreams of meeting him one day, but it takes 8 months and eventually it all ends in another long heart break, but that’s another story for another time…
Four months back in D.C. and she realizes she can’t go on living on her own. She’s trying so hard to be one of those women who mend their hearts and start new lives all on their own, but she’s desperate for love. And so, a blue bird enters her life and she experiences, for the very first time in her life, what healthy, strong, tender love feels like. She learns more about love and life with this little bird than she’s ever done with anyone else. They travel to Maine and Rhode Island, set up mobile bookshops around town, paint, sleep, eat together. She finally gets her divorce, and she drives out to the river with her bird to celebrate. They sit by the water, and there’s a large red stye over her right eye from all the crying, but she feels good, calm, and happy.
Then one day, this woman decides she has to leave. So she packs up all her belongings, leaves the small studio where she lived with her bird, and takes both her bird and all her stuff to her grandmother’s house, and leaves. Before she leaves, she can sense something nagging at her heart, telling her not to go. But she’s always left, and she hasn’t learned that life can be lived any other way. So she goes off to Sweden and Finland and Egypt and Lebanon. In Lebanon, she starts to feel that it’s time to come back. They drive a cousin of hers to the airport, and she thinks, I need to go to the airport too. But she doesn’t. Instead, she gets a disastrous haircut, then flies to Alexandria devastated. and angry about the work she’d come all this way to focus on. When she lands in Alexandria, it doesn’t take long for her to realize she hates it, all of it. Beside the hostel was a court for political prisoners, so each morning she would wake to the chaos outside these courts and the families shouting to the prisoners being brought in large metal trucks. The people look miserable here and everyone has something to say about the way she dresses and how she looks. She’s sick of it all and leaves for Sinai. She goes from camp to camp along the coast until she finally gives up in a freezing bamboo hut. By then it’s too late. Her blue bird has mysteriously learned to fly in her absence (something she hadn’t managed to do in all their time together) and had run away. It was near the end of December and there was no chance of her surviving the cold…
I return on New Year’s Eve, and I stand outside the house my bird had run from, saying my final goodbyes. I’d spent hours in Sinai staring and digging into the white sand, taking long, aimless walks by the Red Sea, saying a thousand goodbyes and I’m sorrys, but nothing lessened the pain of her absence, and the nagging feeling that my going away and leaving had something to do with it. I’d left her with my grandma, and hadn’t I also run away from her once…
So I began 2022 with a crushed heart and a suffocating sense of failure. I’d left, and in leaving, lost everything, my little studio, my bird, the film I’d started, the life I’d built as a woman on my own. And so, thinking I was rescuing the loss, I threw myself into an incredibly stupid project I’d later call, “The Serious Artist.” I was possessed with this exhausting, ugly desire that I wanted to be taken very seriously as an artist. I was trying to work my way out of this heavy feeling of failure, although it would take me a year to realize that failure had almost nothing to do with art. I picked up the pieces of the film I’d left behind, and it was, after all, just pieces. I tried so hard to make something out of those scraps. With every morning, this film that I was so stubborn and rushed about making weighed heavier and heavier on me. Behind the images I had gathered on paper, there was nothing, no story, no sentiment, nothing you’d be able to walk away from the film holding in your hands, your heart. But I was desperate to be known and called a “filmmaker” that it took months of working on the film for me to realize I didn’t even have a story. I didn’t have anything but hallow images.
Something inside me was screaming the answers, and instead of following that voice, I took what I heard and stuffed it into a hopeless script and asked someone else to play out the part I was meant to follow. When everything was guiding me out of this city, telling me to go, I buckled my body down in D.C. and wondered why for the next year I wanted to break everything in front of me, and why I was so hell-bent on ruining good love.
Not surprisingly, the project failed, and to rescue myself from having to face the awful pain of another failure, I threw myself into another project. This time, I would make an exhibit, and everyone in D.C. would know me as an “Artist,” which is really shit. Yes some truth came through this time, and it wasn’t all empty work, but the intention behind the whole thing nearly killed me. The opening night was awful, and I cried like a child through that whole weekend. I hated every part of it. I hated the way I couldn’t handle the stress of it all… everyone’s the eyes and the way I’d opened myself to the world before I truly felt ready. I violated the most sacred part of myself in forcing it to open before its time.
I missed telling you about the part where my bird had come back to me. Earlier that year, a family contacted us saying it had found her. They were leaving their house for New York when Coney landed on their car. Not knowing what to do with her, they took her all the way there with them. I’ve written before of how eerily our lives move in parellel, and just like I’d returned a shadow of myself, so had she. I spent many nights awake with her on my chest, trying to keep her away from the death we both felt was very close. More than sick, she was crushed, even the veterinarian had said so. She diagnosed Coney with “depression.” I didn’t even know that was possible, for birds to hold pain like that. She’d suffered, I could see it, and after all, she’d always reflected so much of me. But when she recovered, she wanted nothing to do with me anymore. It hurt like no other pain I’d known before, and it took me 9 months to realize Coney was asking to go. And so I took her to live with other birds, and that was another painful lesson I had to learn about love…
So 9 months pass in this awful year and I turn 27 and start a job at a museum in D.C. Although it’s a good job with a good mission, I can’t help but feel that things aren’t right at all. I should be happy, but I’m miserable. I go into the office three days a week, I do the work and I do the best that I can, and then I go home and sit on the floor, stare at the walls and wonder why it is I feel so awful. Five months pass. It’s been almost a year and I haven’t been anywhere near the road. My van’s broken and I’m too broke to fix it. Coney’s gone. I’m setting up another exhibit, and preparing an artist talk, but that terrible feeling inside won’t go away. Supposedly, I have just what I wanted. I’d rescued myself from “failure” but I was the most miserable I’d ever been.
So I run off to Florida at the end of the year, and I walk into the last place I’d lived with the man I loved and left years ago. He was everywhere, in the kitchen, on the bed, in the bathroom. I cried the first time I saw the ocean. It’d been the longest time I’d been away. Something was coming back to me. But I still wasn’t ready to see it, and after a beautiful week filled with many missed chances, I took the train back to DC and picked up in the same miserable spot I’d left off.
Then, strange things have happened. I unexpectedly meet this beautiful soul from Syria who begins to slowly change my life. Life, which has felt like a dormant rock for so long, begins to move again. She gives me the name of a place who can fix my van, and after months of saving, I finally get it on the road again. I also manage to do something I should have done years ago: I register the car under my name alone, removing the last of an old, harmful lover from my life. Then, I contact the bird breeder who’d taken Coney 6 months ago, and the first son Coney had had there (a green bird whose photo hangs on the wall here) is still around. Somehow, I’ve always known I was going to be the one caring for him, and there he is, still untaken, waiting… I am no longer at the museum and I’ve promised myself that this time I’m going to figure it out on my own. Something will come, I feel it. And then, after a year of running from it, I start to film again, and it’s the kind of filming I actually want to do. Suddenly, scenes I’ve been holding in my mind for months start to take shape outside of me and in front of a lens, and it’s an overwhelming feeling. I still can’t get myself to look at the footage for too long. And then, after so so long of dreaming of returning to California, I’m five days away from going. I start to paint calligraphy again, and I start to spend time in the van I was almost about to give up on less than two months ago. I start to experiment again…the “Serious Artist” I’d started to create last year is slowly dying…and good riddance.
What I meant to spill here is a very simple and honest confession: that in wanting to be taken seriously as an artist, I’d nearly killed the artist in me. I tasted a little of the success I thought I wanted. I did those exhibits, I spoke, I was listened to. And, I guess I did need to be listened to. I needed the chance to stand in front of my art and face a group of sincere listeners and say, “Let me tell you a little of my story.” But it’s the story and the art and pain that matters, not what it can give me. The artist in me was like clay on a table and I would mold it over and over again until I liked it and I’d go over to someone and try to place that delicate shape of me in their minds. I wasn’t spilling all of me. I was selective, incredibly selective. Maybe because of it each person has walked away carrying the same “Aiyah” in their mind, when actually, if an artist has been truly honest, each person is supposed to walk away carrying completely different and even contradictory versions of the artist. I am supposed to be hated as much as I am loved , but I wasn’t allowing myself to submit to that reality. The artist in me was much busier caring than creating.
I want to be as honest as possible. I had selfish, needy intentions for why I was making art, and why I was living a life that completely went against my nature. The life I’ve always known I wanted, and the kind of art I’ve always wanted to make would never be taken seriously in this city. Add to that that I was in love with a man who was just like D.C in what he thought was worthwhile and right. He couldn’t understand that life, which was so filled with freedom and beauty and honest, messy art. I thought that if I did enough shows, and was loved by everyone, and did “good” work, whatever that means in art, that he’d see me, because I had always had this agonizing sense that he wasn’t seeing me. He was an established photographer and I was…an artist roaming around with a bird, who was trying everything. I wish I’d seen the beauty in that. But I gave so much of that up for him. I was willing, as I’ve always been, to give up everything, absolutely everything, in exchange for love. Bad love, good love, it didn’t matter. I was willing to trade it all for a glance, a smile, a proud smile. But if I can’t get those eyes and that kind of smile in the messy, free life I want to live, then I’d rather not have it all, from him, or from anyone else
And if not for love, than for what! When I loved, truly loved, painting calligraphy, the people around me loved and wanted it too. When I loved setting up books on the street, and it filled my heart like nothing else, the people passing felt this and loved it too. I didn’t used to know this before, not until I saw it and felt it myself, but the moment your heart leaves whatever it is your doing, people around you feel this, trust me. The next year when I tried setting up those mobile bookshops, more out of a need for money than out of love, people on the street stopped noticing me. What once drew so many people and got so many excited stopped being noticing almost completely. And, the moment I started hating painting calligraphy, the moment my heart went numb to it, nobody was asking me to paint for them anymore. I don’t know how the hell people sense these things, but somehow, they do. And so, you see why love has everything to do with it? Not just so that an artist can sell, but so that they can share, freely, and for others to meet the artist halfway, equally excited, equally willing and free. People feel and know, and learning that embarassed me. Even when an artist can hide behind the internet and toss their art into your space, somehow, you know when it’s sincere and made with love and truth. But I was putting on a show, and thinking everyone was falling for it. I fell for it. But I can’t go on doing this anymore. I will only do something out of love, and if others hate it, at least I could know it was the truth. I won’t be loved or hated for my performances anymore. It’ll be for my truth, and isn’t that something I can better live in peace with?
