Unreachable

She was having a certain level of difficulty discerning the exact moment it had started. She knew it started somewhere…everything else did. Maybe it had been during the summer that she could not smile. Not even if she had wanted to. Everyone smiles every now and then- she didn’t…not for a year. If she had, I think her face would have cracked like a hunk of dried clay turned brittle. Heavy & cumbersome- it fit her well in her perdition. Clay hell. It wouldn’t even be a blessing in disguise as I might have hoped for had I cared enough. No. It would just have broken apart and revealed nothing. Who builds clay masks for faceless people? I think she did that summer. Part of the reason she could not pin point when it started was this: she could not keep track of days. Her days were like water and they blended into one another the way that fluids do. She had no land mass chunks of her life she could use to coordinate her position. Her Tuesday was the same as her Saturday and she was reliant upon the weather to separate the days. If she looked outside in the morning and bits of snow were falling from the sky she knew that it was winter and that it was snowing. On Saturday she would remember it snowed. She always drove me nuts with her superfluous moods. She had told me once that she felt like a piece of lint floating, and that you can only notice it when it passed through rays of sunshine from a window. But I knew she wasn’t weightless. No. She was this densely weighted thing that just was sort of there. She couldn’t have been anymore there unless she gave birth to herself…over & over for infinity. During one of her flinty moods, she kept bringing things in and leaving them there. I couldn’t tell you why, as it wasn’t really like her. Still, when she was in this mood, she would. I guess I just assumed she was trying to fill all of this empty space up. Maybe she felt empty? Anyway, it rubbed me raw. It has become my life mission to make this piece of moody lint happy. Even if she never smiles. She painted & she said that it made her happy. This isn’t what she told me, not to my face anyway, because I rarely looked at her. I wanted to wring her neck when I did, so I avoided it. I saw her paintings and saw how she filled all of the space. She would apply a lot of paint to the brushes & spread it this way and that over the canvas. She painted over painted canvases. I think she does it to build up a thick crust of paint. A buffer zone. Something to protect & cushion the blows. You can always tell the spots on the canvas that she paid the most attention to. It was an unrecognizable color…her nameless hue.