Sprawled out on my floor among several tubes of paint, she lay on her stomach propped up by both elbows. I watched her as she sketched an outline of a woman onto my wall, never taking her eyes off it. She continued to talk anyway, extensively explaining her new favorite album over the sound of it playing. She guided me through each song, stressing the importance of listening to an album in sequence—they’ll tell stories if you listen like that. I clung to the storyline, hoping to find pieces of her in every song.
“This album is an absolute experience,” she said, breaking eye contact with the woman she was painting for a couple of seconds to look over at me. “It’s like watching other people’s home movies.” Her paintbrush remained comfortably permanent in her right hand like it was merely an extension of her fingers. She turned back towards the wall and continued, “They all share this weird thread of nostalgia that doesn’t belong to the listener. The kind of once-removed nostalgia that comes with watching strangers’ old home videos. The songs replicate that kind of nostalgia really well. You feel like you’re there watching those videos with them.”
I usually sat quietly next to her when she explained her thoughts to me, either taking them in or trying to decipher them and usually failing to come up with the right answer. The words she spoke hung comfortably in the air between us, open for altercations, objections, and additions. She continued painting, mixing colors as if it were a science, and I watched her from my spot on the floor next to her, observing her the same way she observed her paintings, her reflection in the mirror, her words, critical and blunt but painfully and refreshingly honest. She had paint all over her hair, her big yellow sweater, her hands, her face—nothing seemed untouched by her paintbrush and she remained unbothered, like it was only water. My eyes carefully scanned her face, past freckles that were dusted across her nose and cheeks, past her dark brown eyes that reflected like pools of pure amber, past her waist-long dyed hair she tied up into a braid, past the collection of piercings she’d accumulated. I remembered how mad her mom was when she found out, both of them always matching each other’s anger. They were the kind of fire hazard a cigarette is to a gas station, capable of the same devastating explosion. I marveled at her presence, her ability to change my room into a museum, a haven, a shrine. She had the same ability to turn my room into a war zone, a disaster site, a foreign city. It was hard to imagine the explosion I knew she was capable of, even harder to imagine me being the cigarette that ignites the gas. She had a volatile heart and inside it, I walked on eggshells.
Eventually, like it always does, our silence faded into art. I lay next to her on the floor as she continued to paint, reading her something I wrote, per her request. She stayed silent as I read, she always did. I imagined her turning my words over in her head, trying to decipher them the way I try. I awaited her words in silent agony, hoping she would see meaning in it the way I see it in her art. She sat still in the silence of the last line, hanging in the air between us once more. She put down her paintbrush and picked up a pen instead, a foreign sight in and of itself, and slowly wrote something on the wall next to her masterpiece.
“Love doesn’t have to be a war against life.”
I stared at the wall, my eyes fixated on her words.
“Remember this,” she said after she had finished writing.
“They look out of place next to a piece of art,” I said. “Words aren’t meant to be hung up on display.”
She didn’t have to think before she said, “I don’t think all of them are.”
I envied the confidence she held in her own truth.
“It’s the way you put them out into the world,” she continued. “Do you chuck them hard and duck behind a wall as they explode on enemy territory or do you slave over them night and day until you’ve finally found the ones that make the beautiful concept you had in your head from the very start come to life and put them out in the world for everyone to see? Because someone needs to see them and they’ll know exactly what it feels like, what the art inside those words feels like. They’ll be thankful for what you’ve created, what feeling you’ve allowed them to have.”
The naked woman she had painted in yellow, with clouds for a head, rested on my wall covering an entire corner in my room. She held a smoldering cigarette I kept hoping she wouldn’t drop and ignite my room. I did not mind the space she took up on my wall nor the words as she claimed them for her own on the wall they shared.