getting better

day five

drawing a mime

day three

baxter unfinished

walking man

my college had a cast of rodin's walking man. he stood outside the museum, in an overhang, silently, strongly, remarkably still in his movement. late at night, when there was no one near, i would sit quietly in a chair next to walking man...and watch him. his gorgeous torso...his strong calves...his rock-steady, enormous feet. I knew i wasn't supposed to touch him--he was a work of art--to be admired from afar. i worshipped him. i worshipped the art and the craft and the soul from which he was born.

Very late at night, when i was sure there was no one near, i would place my hand on the frigid cast of his muscled stomach, on the spaces gouged out of his angular back, on the smooth ridge of his superhuman thigh. i couldn't help but touch him. my fingers would itch and a chill would crawl up my spine...i knew it was wrong even as my fingers traced the grooves made by rodin's signature in the base of the sculpture. but how do you stop yourself from doing something you want desperately to do? Walking man was a room full of treasure, and i was hungry for gold.

these sessions would last seconds minutes hours...and i would walk home in the dark, quiet night...calm from my quiet musings and alive from both the thrill of my wrongdoing and my proximity to a work of art that made me disregard all the rules.

not long ago, i returned to the campus. the museum had been redesigned, and they had brought walking man into the museum. he stood in the warmth, in a wash of light that underscored the remarkable talent of his creator...where he should always have been. But for some reason, in that incredible new home, surrounded by a dazzling catalog of painting and sculpture, he had lost, for me, the very qualities that made me adore him.

Gone was he the strong, silent companion of my late night reveries--and, in his place, a devastatingly brilliant work of art.

best of day two

the best of day one...

lust

she stands on the unsigned streetcorner. it is 3am. eyes closed, she breathes in the november air--thick with the scent of approaching winter, but warm and sweet like the spring. the city spins around her...it is alive at this hour in a way it never is during the day.

a group of young men on motorcycles laugh at a joke cracked in spanish--a joke she doesn't understand, but smiles at nonetheless. they don't notice her...they don't notice that she adores them in that moment--they don't see that she loves their wide-awake eyes and the grins on their young faces.

they fade away as she walks up the avenue, facing late-night-early-morning traffic--she watches headlights in the distance careen toward her, until they get close enough for the bright white lights to blind her momentarily, blocking out everything but the feel of the night air on her skin and the sound of engines whizzing past. a horn blows in the distance.

much later, she will wake and throw open the window over her bed. she will lie on her rumpled sheets and let the strange air settle on her naked body and she will forget the season along with her surroundings.

she will remember only the piano that poured onto the street during her solitary walk home. The music spilled from an old clock radio--and the sound that will lazily circle her mind is not the music itself, but the crackle that came with it from a too-long-used speaker. she will look up through the window pane at a reddening sky beyond a concrete landscape and remember that she stood in the street looking up at the bars on that darkened window. she will not remember how long she stood, only that she peered past the wrought iron, a voyeur immensely satisfied by the darkness that accompanied the sound.