the easel of an invisible painting

(written a while back. saw an ad on the subway with a farmer on a tracker and for some reason reminded me of robert burns. not that mice and clouds have anything to do with each other... well in this case, i guess they do. my schemes have gone askew.)

my actions give a better account of the kind of woman i am, rather than my aspirations. as i am sitting at my desk, engulfed in the sounds of honking yellow cabs that my window fails to block out, there is a certain loneliness that traps my joy and contains it within a cage, my ribcage, in fact, and to release such a joy is to wear my heart on my sleeves. sleeveless, currently, i have begun to ponder about the drifting clouds. it is raining outside, and the clouds that are responsible for cooling down this manhattan summer heat will surely see more worlds than i, have surely seen more worlds than i, but just as fast, they will dissipate sooner than i can fathom. their trek across the seemingly limitless sky brings home a vacancy of deception. they are reborn, again and again, yet, we mere humans have but one life to live.

some move swiftly, passing and changing before you have a chance to decide what animals they look like. some move slowly, fulfilling their trade as iridescent beings and drowning you in anxiety as you begin to wonder why they look so fake and raw... floating subtly and meaninglessly. this brings me back to a time when teenage angst lurked around every emotion. after school hours were spent with friends, companions whose moves i've traced. we sat there one day, four of us i think, behind the school gym, and we spoke of mobility. we didn't call it then at the time, of course. we anticipated the future, as every high school junior afraid of where they would end up or not end up would do. that's what the future is isn't it? just us being mobile, moving toward something unknown, something eerie, something unpredictable... aren't we all artists, then? building and creating and moving... as we sat there spreading ourselves thin over fears and discomfort, we looked up at the sky. the rolling sun peaked through the rolling hills of the silicon valley. sunset had already begun, and was pretty much complete, moving on to light up another part of the world for another set of teenagers to look at the rising sun and wonder why people change. however, there still lay a few purple streaks in the sky, and as we were enjoying the mundane, we understood why people used to think the world was flat. it wasn't until we watch the clouds race across the vast canvas as if they were chasing after the sun, that we really put it together. this revelation was followed by laughter. i was fifteen, maybe sixteen, and the sky looked like a flat, mobile painting. i felt like i was seven years old.

what bugs me now is that those were the same clouds that people saw a thousand years ago. most of them anyway. why, on a microscale, does life seem so daunting? we're so afraid of change, and that discomfort makes us uneasy. yet, on a macroscale, life seems so boring, so frivolous. these clouds will rain themselves out only to be lifted up into the sky again.

when i was seven years old, i used to look at clouds all the time. i'm pretty sure i wasn't a very introspective seven year old, so the idea of the world being flat or round probably never made it to my mind. the first house i lived in was rented. my foggy memory prevents me from trying to picture the floor plan of the house or which relative occupied which room. i don't remember very much about that house, except for an incident in which a neighbor and i learned about dialing 911 from our kindergarten teacher. after school that day, we went home and dialed those three unforgettable numbers, hid behind the curtains, and watched my confused grandmother who until this day, speaks no english, try to frantically communicate with the firemen who showed up. this story, although, has been repeated over and over again by my grandmother and mother so many times that i don't even know if i actually remember dialing 911 or if the repetition drilled an image into my head. what i do remember, is a time when my dad was someone i could look up to. after dinner every night, he'd grab a lawn mat, lay it on the grass in our front yard (right next to a rose bush that i was also afraid of going near, but i miss it now, since i drove by that old house a few years ago and the new residents had cut it down), and watch the stars with my younger sister and i. we would try and count every incandescent diamond speckle amongst the onyx sky. just a memory now. even if we tried, it wouldn't be the same. a certain innocence is lost through the aging years. the awe a child once found in the world decays just as fast as its arrival.

like the moving clouds, the "stationary" stars are unchanged. if i were to fly back home, sneak onto the lawn of that old house, and gaze up into the night sky, i would be able to see the very same stars that my dad used to point out. the stars are still there, but the house has changed. repainted, remodeled... they even got rid of that god damn rose bush, but the stars are the same. the heroic glow in my dad's eyes are gone, but the stars are the same. the time when i was small and fear was a product of rose bushes has passed, but the stars are the same. the ridicule and alienation implanted on non-believers of a flat world thrived in a time when the stars were the same as today's stars. these stars are so old, their changing lives move slower than snails conducting a clockwork, providing us with nothing but a memory of a time that we can't have back.

there are reasons to be angry at the clouds outside, and there are reasons to bask in their comfort. they remind me of a place that lives in a dungeon of working cells attaching and transmitting signals to my thoughts. there is a certain intangibleness that pertains to mobility, one that i often try to grab and hold close. i try to use that as an excuse, or better, simply an explanation of the kind of person i am, as if they are the reactants and i'm the product of a bizarre chemical reaction, as if they are the totems i've strategically placed around my aspirations, as if i am the white heron waiting for mythical winter flakes to hide under. but these clouds have told me that i've been dotting my i's too far left. imperceptible is the nakedness of mobility. we forget the world that we live in.

absolute contentment is an entity that waits for us. it is void of tiers and no divination can offset clues on how to attain such a world. the clouds and the stars have reached it many times before. i thought i could find it by digging through my past and looking for flaws, by mobilizing myself and changing my location, both geographical and mental, by reading reading reading and reading until pieces of the map drew themselves, by following the ebbing and flowing of polar waters trying to find their way through blue caves of frozen crystal lattice. the immortal clouds have shown me what i had and lost, but they are the articles that connect me to my past, to my present, and to my future. when i look up at night, i know my dad is looking at the same stars. when this thunderstorm ends, the guilty vaporous fluffs will keep moving until they reach him, only to keep on moving. absolute contentment is an entity that waits for us forever.