// Sick with lack of basis//

The weather has been good for wallowing. I’ve always loved the rain, but something about the gray, gray, gray of spring storms makes me feel heavier, darker, duller. I remember that it used to be something of a ritual in my house, we’d all go to the garage during the summer storms, take out the lawn chairs and watch it come down. The slope of our land allowed us a decent view of the sky. As decent as you could hope for in the man-made suburbs of a flatland state. And I remember the night we pulled into the mountains. You arrived first and waited for me to take a late train. I was hungry and tired when we arrived, the house was dark. I insisted we sit on the overlook and take in the stars for awhile, even though it was cold. It was the clearest night of our trip and had we not stopped then, we might never have known the depth and breadth of the cosmos, that which can only be seen from views unsullied by electric light. I felt like I could see the entire universe. I wanted to stay like that, neck craned upward, wrapped inside a too-thin hoodie, staring at the sky. I cried because it was so beautiful I didn’t know what else to do.

The stars make me think about life, and death, because the universe is seemingly infinite and we are so clearly not. In high school I used to feel death on my neck. I won’t say I thought a lot about death, maybe death thought about me. The feeling would creep up on me out of the blue, and I would get this feeling in my chest that I took for the feeling of knowing what it would be like to be erased. What has always frightened me about death, about endings, was the question I had about where it all goes. Where does the love, the good deeds, the art, the insights, the late night philosophizing, where does it all go when we die? I wonder this about the people that pass in and out of our lives as well. If you stop loving someone, if they stop loving you, or at least you stop loving enough to stay together, what happens to all the times you searched deeply, desperately in each other’s eyes, to all the times you pledged yourselves to the other, to the breakfasts you made, to the times you got drunk and yelled with reckless abandon into the night, to the love you made, to the love you shared?

I am not sure that I have ever stopped loving anyone. And that does not include the boy I so unfortunately met in high school, the day I caught a ride with a senior in my junior year math class, skipping the end of the day assembly. Enough of us were escaping that I couldn’t fit in his car and I ended up in another, with someone whom I would eventually pass two years of my life buried inside an emotionally and mentally destructive relationship. One from which I would spend four times the number of years trying to rebuild myself. That was not love, that is not what I am talking about.

You told me that my art reminded you of the 18th century Japanese wood block prints. I’m not sure why. Maybe something about the two-dimensionality of my characters, maybe something in the shy but scheming looks the women gave, something in the intention. So I drew the courtesan Shigezuma of the Echizenya, Eisho’s work just years before the dawning of the 19th century. She holds what could be a cloth, but what I interpret as a letter, presses it to her lips. There is a sense of mischief and delight in her face, but something else that suggests unfulfilled desire, sadness, pain run just beneath the surface. I give her a letter, from me to you. It says all the things that I no longer know how to say, or have the right to say. It says all the things I think about death, and the end of relationships, the end of love, and the pain of feeling alone in this world. It says everything I will ever need to say and everything you will ever need to know, except I will never read it, and neither will you.