poetry has no place for a heart that's a whore

[Brackie]

She put down the charcoal and placed the canvas onto the easel for the first time. She blinked, taking it in, and began to pour out her paint.

♪ And I'm young and I'm strong but I feel old and tired ♪

A Spotify playlist for the Big Little Lies soundtrack had been on loop for days now. Every loop through she became stuck on this one song, just this one in particular. Every other three minutes was fine, but the roadblock was always Martha Wainwright. The words stung, but the girl in the empty house was used to it by now, because everything stung, and it was only through her distractions that she made it through the day. The ghost stain from her previous painting attempt hung over the charcoal figure much like its namesake. She looked at the clock and saw she'd spent three times as long on this process as she'd normally done, which was fine. It was all fine, she just wanted to make something worthy of memory, so what did it matter? She could be as thorough as she needed. The value layers weren't hard, just everything else. But hard was better. It meant it was working, it meant she was doing something worthwhile.

The whites were lain first, and they would eventually be rare, except for his skin and a little spot in the middle of his shirt. Jonathan never really wore white, especially in the base for what she was making, but he was certainly pale. She joked about it a lot, and he took it, because she was that to him, someone who let him know how stupid and white he could be sometimes. The whites on her painting wouldn't be white for long, but they helped. Next were the mid-lights, more common but still just as rare. They made the whites look whiter, like her to him. Then, the midtones. They were everywhere, from his hair to his jacket which just black enough, seeping into the edges and creating the frame.

♪ You say my time here has been some sort of joke ♪

They were all gone. Her sister was here, somewhere, but everyone else was gone. The bus never came back, the bus she never got on because her tonsils had swollen to the size of grapefruit and nothing could be swallowed without first swallowing the urge to scream. The days made them better, but not anymore. She would give anything for that pain again, instead of this one. This one spread everywhere, and some days she was nothing but the pain.

The darks had been filled in, and Jonathan's cloud consumed the canvas. She could still see the lines, but the lines were important. They made him who he was. They could be filled in later, when it was dry.

*

♪ No idea how it feels to be on your own ♪
♪ In your own home ♪
♪ With the fucking phone ♪

Hours later, she didn't know how many, it could have been any from three to thirty, the song came around again, and her thumb pressed the small circle until the tiny digit appeared next to it. The whites and the darks had lost their wet shimmer, so the girl mixed new paints. Nearly the same colors, but bolder. Brighter. She adjusted the easel, an angle that would no longer make her wrist hurt.

It was time to block the colors. Give Jonathan a background, make him real, invite him into her home again. Maybe if she made him real, it would dampen what she felt.

Her eyes darted around the canvas, trying to figure out what to start first. Maybe the background? Maybe his hair? His shirt? The white spot in the middle suddenly felt like a black hole, she didn't want to touch it right now lest she become sucked in. It was still blocky, but she still recognized it. She recognized him. Every since they first met, she could see him in a crowd with a blindfold on spun around, and she could still remember the sounds that came from his mouth that one fateful afternoon in junior year. This painting would never make those sounds. She'd never hear those sounds again, but why think about that? Why think about anything like that when the whole point of this entire goddamn painting was to bring him back in the ways that she could and not fixate on the ways that she would never be able to? The way nobody could ever do, unless he changed so suddenly that she wasn't sure if she could bear it in the state of impossibility that scenario lay in.

Her hand was moving.

♪ Oh I wish I wish I wish I was born a man ♪
♪ So I could learn how to stand up for myself ♪
♪ Like those guys with guitars ♪

The ghost of Jonathan was now astigmatism over smoke, and that was fine. She could get real glasses to fix that.

*

Hours later, she still hadn't left her room. A small pile of wrappers was becoming a tower under her pillow, they woke her up whenever she moved. Time had become impossible to track. And yet, Martha Wainwright appeared again, and so did the digit and the green circle.

Jonathan's ghost was still there, sitting on the canvas, waiting for refinement. She got up, she mixed paints, and sat back down, adjusting the easel once more until he was ready to topple over onto her. She'd fixed the shirt, no matter her misgivings, no matter how much it sucked her in and made her want to join him. She ignored the spikes, ignored how long and shallow her breath was becoming, and met her paintbrush to his eyes.

And once they had been filled in, once she was staring into the closest thing she could ever see to Jonathan again, she stopped. Her breath didn't, the spikes didn't, but her hand did. She looked through the easel, looked at what she was blocking from her own view in her own room, to the pile of discarded canvases sitting in a pile under her desk, some splashed with darkness. Others ripped. In moments they were another tower, creating a city in her room of her failures and her utter inability to do anything meaningful in the face of it all.

Her hand shook.

The girl's tiny knuckles sharpened on the brush until she looked at the centre of Jonathan's shirt. In some ways she was holding a knife. In others, she was just about to repeat what she'd been doing for days and days and days, to try when she had been told by the main voices there was nothing she could do.

The bristles met the canvas hard, creating a curve. Again, and again, the useless girl sat in her room destroying the one thing she'd tried to do to help herself because she just couldn't get to the part where he was too real, but if she made him any less real then what was the point?

What was the point of her doing any of this?

♪ I will not pretend ♪
♪ I will not put on a smile ♪

The canvas ripped as her brush smashed through it once again, knocking the easel to the carpet, and Ji-hyun curdled her own blood with a scream.