Borders

*Prelude: So I'm currently working on compiling a portfolio for Grad School (Creative Writing), and I'm randomly writing little Brevities to see if they'll work. Malo 'aupito!*

Of my two siblings, I usually choose more artistic routes of expression/sanity-maintenance. I feel more spiritually thrilled by bluegrass stringed harmony than by a man behind a pulpit, I’d weep if the world ran out of ink, and Frida Kahlo’s “Broken Column” (my favorite artist and painting in high school,) sent thrills so violent I thought the nerves would chip my spine to the likeness of hers. I love her details and colors, just as I loved the chaos of Jackson Pollock or the haunting, addicting voice of Thom York. Music and art has always been the mom and dad of my aesthetic upbringing. Like when Pocahontas and John Smith run through wind and forests, past colorful animals and rivers full of hues and swirling life.
I loved, I cared, I felt and pined for muses and superpowers in the expressive form just to absorb like osmosis into my finger-fibers, guiding my way through piano chords and stubborn Crayolas. At the age of 4, I picked out the melody to “My Old Kentucky Home,” yet I also spent my entire childhood (and adolescence…and teenage years) loathing every normal student’s favorite activity.
Most of the time, I would observe the expertise with which my careful girlfriends would apply equal pressure between each crayon stroke. I was always drawn to the darker, bolder colors of coloring-book images; however, the softer, pastel-y pictures taunted me like the frilly ‘little lady’ my grandmother always wanted me to be. I was messy; my half-dark-half-light strokes went in crazy directions and, heaven forbid, off the page. I could spell tornado at age five, but I just couldn’t keep Mickey’s red pants inside the lines!
I finally made peace with my artistic (in)abilities the semester before I graduated college. My philosopher friend lit incense and prepared a vegan meal before scraping through our collaborative efforts at Philology. With her encouragement, I found myself at a canvas and four paints: pink, white, moody blue, and black. (There’s nothing like Vladimir Nabokov and Nietzsche to provoke an artistic dumping session.)
I resurfaced an hour later to my own scrutiny and my friend’s amazement at filling a medium-sized canvas with a free-handed painting of a Puritan-style bodice (the top of the painting) and skirt with an aged tree trunk stouting itself below the lacy flows of the hem. We had conversations during my applied skills, but the only cognitive process I remember was to add the pink bow at the bodice for a Mrs. Goodman Brown tribute.
Nearly halfway through my Peace Corps service, I found myself sitting down to water colors and sketch paper, dibbing and swooping my way into a hills-and-skyscrapers smorgasbord into…something about Blues. I’m still not sure where it came from, though I felt strangely empowered by Anne Lamott’s dread locks, bluegrass music, and self-conscious views of the previous night’s jam-session with some talented musicians, in which I sang with a slightly scratchy (and very strained) voice.
I’m always a bit weary of my singing voice, anyway. At four I was mimicking Whitney Houston and my sister told me to make my voice stop shaking because I sounded like one of the older ladies in our church. (I stopped immediately.) As a teenager, I had to sing a lot in church and was encouraged to nearly scream the melody so the old people could hear and the young people wouldn’t have to hear the old people. Revival season left me hoarse halfway through—all I wanted to do was sing my normal voice, but I always toned it down because I had a tendency to “jazz things up” a bit.
I suppose I started letting my voice take its own form just a few months before my Mrs. Goodman Brown Puritan Tree-trunk painting popped out of my dark place. In this self-discovery time period, a lyric from Damien Rice’s “Accidental Babies” really embedded itself—“is he dark enough/enough to see your light?” I suppose that lyric led to a bit of overdue self-acceptance. I had to dig to that dark, moody, outside-the-lines self to really understand the whole self—the one without the perfectly drawn outlines ready to fill in.
And that’s my border in life. As the curvy body of the Ohio River forms Kentucky’s top, I’m the formation of flowing, bold colors and no real outline. No distinguished shapes to color between. In my dark place, I begin as a blank page—open, hidden with visual combinations. I’m a harmony waiting to find a melody, or a melody waiting for the dark to absorb me with confidence before I’ll let my inner noise take a floaty shape in the waiting air.