20 Days ’til 2020
Twenty days until 2020, I come to an end that will form a beginning.
Not too long ago, I started a journal. Something different. Something I’ve always added to Pinterest boards, Instagram-liked, but never allowed myself to fully implement. Daily. Even if for 15 minutes a day.
Journaling.
But not the kind with scattered thoughts because the free-form word vomit, in all my Caulfieldian glory, I would leave them stale, under the dust of my mundanity. And then I would move on. To a new journal. Because leaving a journal meant I was done with that period of my life. Changing seasons. Mercury in retrograde. Moons phased out.
This time, I went in with a different approach.
I tried writing in blocks. In little post-its, taping them onto pages so that they created a neat collage. In some respects, this was a visual way of physically compartmentalizing all my traumas and good omens in a way that felt breathable. Digestible. Possible to tackle, to take in. Bit by bit.
Because now, I’m able to trace back to the gray-soaked afternoon where I hid in the Seoul Museum of Art. Just to hide. From the day. From the heavy downpour. From life, I guess. I was met with David Hockney’s works. I reached the ones with all the negative space. You know the ones. Rich in mundanity, pure simplicity. Yet they bring a calmness that rained sun rays through the tall glass windows of the museum.
I stood in front of a A Bigger Splash for a long time. Watching the splash. Seeing it shift shapes when I would walk away, come back, and breath in the mist of that splash, one that reminded me of Amtrak tracks along the ocean, in between Santa Barbara to San Diego. Because I missed home. Because I missed myself, all my past selves that were a little less sad than I am now. I stood unsatisfied, looking for my own reflection in the white-veined Pollock strokes that Hockney branched out in that splash.
I came home with a notebook. No lines. No grid. Because I craved liberty in the blankness. To scrawl and fill in all that I could. And if I wanted my words to breathe, I would leave them all the negative space they needed.
Being able to cut up my details and squeeze them into squares and see them, actually see them in block-ish forms cleared up the days ahead of me. Future plans. Current themes. Parts of myself filtered in clarity.
And here we are now. Started. A Lawn Sprinkler. Hockney painted it in 1967, with water raining up in soft curtains, hiding glass sliding doors on an empty afternoon, one with open possibility. Something to remind me of the suburbs, adequate homes tucked neatly between picket-fences, cookie-cutting middle class dreams sandwiched between Monday and Friday. I get it now. Not all that bad I made it out to be when I was sixteen and angsty. Because it was structure, and I’ve created a structure that works for me.
We are getting somewhere.
