The Crossing

The unforgiving canvas of your gray couch paints a painful picture.

You’ve crushed your creativity to death. Suffocation by sense, laceration by logic. Your artistic empire has been reduced to graphite dust.

Death to creativity.

You, still a pupil of the palette, must pay your respects to your long-suffering friend. So you start crafting your eulogy, your head a sluggish strum of strings.

The melody of memories that ensues is short, focused, and hard to place.

Cars bleeding from their rear lights into humming rivulets of rain. Atmosphere’s great release absorbed, diverted, consumed. You took notice when the swollen static amplified creativity’s call. Logic languished as you traveled on in the terrifying storm. The world was screaming at you so beautifully.

This eulogy should have more focus, shouldn’t it?

No.

It should be chaotic and crisp in its linguistic longing for the shadows of sold-off ideas, of cruelly cast-out creations, of the intertwined enigmas of interlocking brains.

Right-handed, right-brained. You had it right before you veered left.

You had it right when you were young and in possession of thick paint labeled “washable” and “mess-free”. You knew back then that artists do not wash, but they do make messes (on a young girl’s dolphin shirt, for example). Colorful specks and splatters, Woodstock inspired. Only those dolphins said no to drugs and yes to inter-aquatic space travel.

You thrived in that non-sensical world, where scents had feelings and colors had missions, and craft supplies had nine lives, and twenty uses, and hundreds of stories to smear into being.

You wrote an impossibly long lament on a hair strand you found in your shower that looked like Salvador Dali’s profile (inter-aquatic space travel 2.0)

Creativity would have liked that reminiscence, would have loved the subtle alliteration, would have added a dozen more specks to the palette of poignancy you are trying to memorialize.

This eulogy wouldn’t have legs without a flashback to a sunset melting into the bleak base of winter. Without recounting the poem on shoes, the story on pumpkins smashed into the spurned wrinkles of Main Street…

…the dregs of the Adriatic pooling at your weary feet.

…the lonely fisherman tucked into the only deserted crevice of Venice, not waiting for the fish to bite. Just waiting for the world of wants and wanters to stop biting.

The times you fell to to ground and fell back in love with the shifting sky.

The times you flew to Europe at sunset and the humming world below became the shifting landscape that romanced you.

You are a pupil of perspective too.

So now, you remember that a eulogy to creativity doesn’t end. It only begins, and begins, and begins.

So, before you begin again, you let creativity make the crossing…

A Eulogy Homecoming.

Create,

Anna