Tears on a Canvas or I'm Your Grief, Honey

There I lay on the bathroom floor. I had no more sobs, no more tears to let fall. I had watered those yellow tiles for endless eternities, flooding them with the salty water that should have stayed in the sea but was overflowing from my soul. As of yet no flowers had bloomed from those rains but I imagined that if a flower did indeed sprout from between the bathroom tiles, fed by my despair, it would be a thistle.

Ugly.

Prickly.

And impossible to get rid of.

I prepared to let loose yet another soul crushing wail when

it all

lifted.

Floated

away.

I became

a cloud.

A waft

of

warm

air.

I lay for a moment afraid to move. Had I fallen asleep? Had I died.

Maybe I was no more and that was why I no longer felt the pain.

Because it—like I—didn’t exist anymore.

As it turned out the exact opposite was the case. My grief—exactly like I—existed.

Corporeally.

“Four-in-one? Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and… toothpaste? Awh hell nah. You just open your mouth while washing your hair and you call it a day?”

I peeked out from between my curled up knees, saw feet standing by the shower. A pair of beat-up checkered vans, Jeans cuffed a tad too high. Mismatched socks.

“It’s like trying to mix chocolate, olive oil, ketchup and an apple—you get the worst of all worlds! Why do you even have this stuff?”

It was quiet in the bathroom.

I didn’t know what to say.

The checkered shoe nudged me in the ribs. “Hello Miss Bawling-my-eyes-out-on-the-bathroom-floor I’m talking to you.”

“Leave me alone,” I mumbled. My soul felt strangely empty.

Hollow.

As though it had been full of something painful but now that the pain was gone there was nothing left and in a way that vacuum was even worse.

“Leave you alone? Girl, I ain’t leaving till you tell me why in the world you ain’t got any no-slip mats in this shower. What if you fell!”

I remained silent, trying to come to grips with the gaping hole in my chest, when the figure knelt down in front of my face. Nose ring, the beginnings of dreadlocks hidden under a beanie, a face contorted in a squint.

“Hello?” he said, waving his hand before my eyes. “Anybody home? Please don’t tell me I took your tongue when I left your body.”

“Who are you?” I said.

He stood up straight, flashed a smile. “I’m your grief, Honey. And I’m fucking starving, so let’s dry up them tears and find some bread to toast, shall we?”

I let him help me to my feet. He dried my eyes with his sleeve, tried to fix my hair, gave up, then flashed me another perfect smile.

“You’re my grief?” I asked.

“Guilty as charged.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Not officially, but the other emotions used to call me Tristan.”

“Used to?”

Tristan bobbed his head from side to side, wriggling his dreadlocks. “Your other emotions haven’t been very… on the surface, lately. So I’ve come out here to see what’s going on with you. How are you?”

“What?”

He scrunched his nose. “Look, this is a very tiny bathroom for a very big conversation. Would you mind terribly if we moved it anywhere else?”

“We can go out into the living room, I guess,” I said, studying Tristan intently.

My grief.

Outside of my body.

Worldly and thus…

vulnerable.

He grabbed the doorhandle when something on the floor next to the bathtub caught his eye.

“Is that a toaster?”

I shuffled my feet. “Maybe,” I said.

“Wait, were you about to…?” He gestured to the toaster.

“No!” I said a bit too quickly. “People only do that in movies. I just have it in here for… decoration.”

“Right… I’m just gonna—” He plugged the toaster out of the wall. “Let’s take this into the kitchen so I can make toast and so you don’t… yeah.”

He opened the door and guffawed out loud.

“Goodness! Do you cry liquid gold or something?”

He walked out into the multi-story penthouse apartment that was my fortress of solitude.

“I’m a painter,” I said. “And where Daddy’s heart lacked his wallet did not.”

“You don’t say.” Tristan spun around, toaster under his arm, looking at the enormous windows, the beautiful wooden floor, the massive white couch, and, of course, the television that was the width of a schoolbus. “You any good as a painter?”

“You should know.”

“I really shouldn’t. I know nothing about you—not even your name.”

“You don’t know my fucking name? “

“We’ve never been introduced,” he said.

“YOU’RE ME!”

“No, I’m your grief. Big, big difference.”

I shook my head. “You’ve been ruining my life for years and still you don’t know anything about me.”

He held up his hands. “Ruining your life? Honey, I ain’t the one making you sad. I’m not the cause, I’m the symptom. Does that make sense? And I—as a symptom—have been getting out of hand. I know I’m fly but I ain’t supposed to look like this.” He ran a hand over his shirt. “But something’s been making me more and more potent for a decade and poof now I’m corporeal.”

He strolled through to my kitchen, pulled open drawers and cabinets, dug through the fridge.

“You don’t have any food,” he complained.

“I’ve been depressed.”

“Right. Sorry about that.” He finally found a few slices of bread and plugged in the toaster.

“Look, we’re just gonna chat for a little while,” Tristan said, “get to know each other, and then I’m going right back inside, okay?”

I chewed my fingernail, observing as my grief ate toast in my kitchen. “Excuse me just one moment,” I said, and almost sprinted upstairs. I flew to my desk, opened the top drawer, and there lay the Colt 1851 Navy Revolver that had once been Wild Bill Hickok’s. I grabbed it and snuck downstairs.

To hell with going back inside. For once I had my grief right where I wanted it—in my sight.

My hands trembled as I checked the gun was loaded. Tristan must have heard the click for he turned around, bread halfway to his mouth.

“Is that a fucking gun?”

It shook in my hands as I tried to point it at his chest. “Yes.”

“Why do you have a gun?”

“I’ve been sad”

His eyes widened. “Jesus…”

“But now I’m not.”

“Oh,” Tristan said. “That’s great. What changed?”

”You became a plausible target,” I said, pulling the trigger.

The bullet left the barrel and flew wide, splintering a vase on the other side of the room.

“Goddamn, girl! What the fuck?”

I tried to steady the gun before firing again. The bullet smashed a window and went free into the night.

“Are you tryna to shoot me?”

“If you stand still for two seconds I’ll answer that question. Dammit. I said stand still.”

“I am standing still, it’s your hands that are doing the Macarena while you’re holding a gun!”

I fired again and this time I chopped off one of his dreadlocks.

“Hey!” he yelled and ran out of the kitchen, half a piece of toast still clutched in his fist.

I chased him into the living room, aiming, firing, hitting the giant TV. I fired again, watching him dive behind the couch.

I tried to aim in the general vicinity of the couch, pulled the trigger, and… nothing happened.

The hammer clicked.

Yet no bullets went flying.

“Are you out of ammo?” Tristan called.

“I think so,” I admitted.

“Do you have any more stashed somewhere?”

“No.”

“You’re not just saying that to trick me into standing up so you can whack my head off with a final bullet?”

“Would I be able to hit you if I were?”

“Fair point,” my grief conceded and stood up. His beanie had fallen off somewhere and the facial expression he wore was one of exhausted exasperation. “Would you mind putting the gun away?”

I rolled my eyes. “Why?”

“I want you to be safe.”

“It’s yourself you should be worried about.”

I put the gun on the coffee table. “Would I be happier if I managed to kill you?”

He sighed. “Listen, people don’t reach the point of sadness you’ve reached by sheer chance. Kill me and you’ll be happy until I inevitably come back. There is a cause that needs to be addressed.”

“And just like that I’ll be cured?”

“Cured,” he laughed, putting a hand on his hip. “Honey, you’re bathing next to a toaster, and you’ve guns—” he fluttered his fingers “—upstairs. This ain’t something a bandaid can fix. But this—” he gestured to himself “—sure ain’t normal either. So let’s figure out what the cause is and see if we can’t do something about it.”

“You want me to lie down on a leather couch and tell you my innermost thoughts?” I scoffed.

“No. I wanna go exploring.”

With that he skipped off towards the stairs.

“Where are you going?” I called after him.

“To the top of the tower!”

Up and up he ran, past my bedroom, past the study and the office and the library and the—

“Oh no you don’t,” I muttered, seeing him grab hold of the handle to the one door I didn’t want him to open.

The door to my gallery. The high ceilinged room that smelled of paint thinner and oak. The place where I stored every painting I had that wasn’t on display somewhere.

I caught up to him as he paused, three feet inside the room, looking around in awe.

Paintings

everywhere.

Hanging on the walls, standing on easels, lying on the floor.

Paintings of fair maidens in nooses, children sleeping with monsters at their beds, even depictions of nature: hurricanes tearing apart forests, tsunamis crashing onto beaches, the dark expanse that is the sea.

“You made these?”

I cast my eyes down. “Something like that.”

“They’re beautiful.”

He walked between them, only barely refraining from running his hands along their canvases. He passed one that was torn in two, one with holes in it, one that had been ripped apart.

”Some of them are broken,” he said.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Why?”

“Because I remember what they symbolise: different times in my life. Times I would rather forget.”

“Why did you paint them in the first place then?”

I shrugged. “To punish myself maybe. To process it. Or perhaps because I paint better when I’ve got tears in my eyes.”

Tristan stared at me, gears obviously turning in his mind.

“Oh my god,” Tristan said suddenly, spinning round and round in my gallery. “It all makes sense now.” He stopped abruptly, staring right at me. “You depend on me.”

“I hate you.”

“Those two are not mutually exclusive at all.”

“I tried to kill you!”

“Oh come on, I was standing two feet in front of you, nobody’s that bad of a shot. You need me because without me you don’t have any of this—” he circled his finger in the air. “You think I’m your muse. So you’ve caught me, chained me, and now you’re fattening me up! Is that right?”

My eyes prickled. Not out of grief for he was standing in front of me. This was from frustration and anger and hate. “Do you see that painting there?” I croaked. “That one with the lighthouse?”

Tristan walked over to it. “Yeah.”

“Do you see the crashed ships?”

He nodded.

“And the crew drowning as they swim to shore?”

Another nod.

“That was the first painting I made after they stitched my arms back up. It won a Malcolm. It has been displayed in more art galleries than I have scars on my wrist.”

“Wow,” Tristan said. “That’s dark.”

“That one over there I made the day after my dad died. Spent over thirty hours straight painting. It became the cover of Times.”

“It’s very…”

“Sad? Horrible? Grief-stricken? That’s because you guided

every

single

stroke.”

“I didn’t—” Tristan began.

“And that enormous, half-finished monstrosity behind you? I painted that with a loaded gun on my desk—the very same one I fired at you. Every day I chose whether I would pick up the brush or the weapon. The Louvre has already offered me a seven digit sum for it and it’s not done yet. “

“Did you say yes?”

“No, because I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t pick up the gun one night and a red splatter really wouldn’t suit the motive.”

“Jesus.”

“So yes, it would appear that I need you. Problem is I’ve reached a bit of a dilemma. I can no longer live with you—you’ve grown too big. Nor can I live without my art—something I cannot create without you. Any way I flip the coin it lands on a jump from the roof being my only real way out now that I’ve spent all my bullets and you’ve stolen my toaster. So if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna take the stairs.”

Thus I turned on my heel and marched off.

For a moment I heard nothing but my own footsteps.

Then I heard his, running to catch up to me.

But instead of grabbing my wrist or telling me to stop, he simply fell in step next to me.

“You’ve a rooftop terrace?” he asked. “You ever paint up there?”

I scowled at him. “Mind your own business, little muse of mine.”

“You know it wasn’t me that painted those paintings, right?” he asked as we emerged onto the roof. It was just past sunset, remnants of warmth still on the sky.

“Sure,” I mumbled, walking right towards the edge. “The hand that guides versus the hand that makes.”

“You’re giving me too much credit.”

“Reach the point I have and it becomes hard not to give you credit for everything.” I stepped onto the ledge of the roof, peered down. “Would this fix it?”

He hopped onto the ledge next to me, looked over, then sat down, legs dangling. “In much the same way as curing a patient of cancer by decapitating them.”

In spite of myself I chuckled and sat down next to Tristan.

“Are you done trying to kill me?” he asked.

“Would pushing you off the roof change anything?“

“Probably not.”

“Then yes, I am.”

“Good.”

We gazed out at the bustling city.

“You know it’s okay to paint bad things, right?”

“Not if you’ve painted something succesful once. Mediocrity is not something you’re allowed to return to. Not in this world.”

“What this world allows you to return to and what you allow yourself to return to are not necessarily the same.”

“Does that difference matter? Paint one great thing and greatness becomes expected of you.”

“And that one great thing you painted with your grief as driving force so now you think that’s the only way to go about it,” Tristan said.

“So far it’s the only thing that has worked,” I shot back. “If I get too happy my art suffers. But if I get sad enough that’s when I finally make my way in this world.”

Tristan sat kicking his feet in the air. One of his slip-ons hung loose. “Grief is always something you can fall back on. But if you had as much joy as you have grief, you’d be just as inspired. Not just joy, but awe too. Or love. Or curiosity. I was never the one to inspire you, it was the intensity of me. That’s what makes your paintings so impressive. Their potency. Not their grief.”

I shook my head. “Their grief makes them relatable.”

Tristan laughed out loud. He pulled up his leg, adjusted his shoe. “If relatability was what made you popular, then a drawing of a toilet would have been even better, for everyone has to shit. Listen, emotions inspire. The only reason grief has become so popular is because it’s so easy to come by. Happiness can be just as favourable a muse if you know where to look for it.”

“I can’t just be happy.”

“I’m not telling you to just be happy. Nor am I telling you to no longer be sad. But something’s clearly wrong here.” He gestured to himself. “Emotions ain’t supposed to look like this. Be sad, be angry, be frustrated. But remember that some emotions are best held onto so lightly a slight breeze can blow them away.”

“What if become happy and I never make anything as good as what I’ve made when I was sad?”

He looked at me. “Honey, if you get any more sad you won’t be able to paint for you’ll yourself be a splatter on the pavement. Grief is a powerful inspiration, but the fire that warms you will burn you to death if you hold it too tight.”

I exhaled deeply. “I’m sorry I tried to shoot you.”

He laughed. “I’m sorry I ate your bread. You really need to go shopping.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“So there’ll be a tomorrow?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“I’m glad,” he said with a smile. “Oh look, here comes that breeze I was talking about.”

He licked his finger, held it up to check the wind.

And he was gone.

I sat alone on the rooftop, my legs dangling over the edge. Down below cars whirled like marching ants, headlights casting bright cones to rival the streetlights.

Looking at that scene now, at the way my brushstrokes made the cars become blurs going faster than they ought to, it amuses me to think how long it would have taken me to hit the pavement.

I stand there in the museum, looking at my own painting. Thirty stories. Four seconds.

One.

Two.

Three.

And I turn away and leave the museum to work on my current piece, a portrait of a young man with dreadlocks and a beanie and a smile.