Post-it Note

This morning before driving over the suspension bridge that brings me to where you paint, I shaved my head. Not because I needed to, usually that comes every four days when stubble marks distinct lines between skin and new growth. But this morning I felt something different, the need to do something more. Like after a long hot summer when I slip my arms through the worn leather jacket I purchased at a second hand store and feel the cool material on my bare arms, a second skin. Turning sideways I look into the ornate full length mirror which hangs opposite your painting and squint until the photons settle and my reflection is clarified and then I turn again to your painting.

I remember you told me once how a Buddhist monk goes through his initiation ceremony. He accepts his precepts, then leaves behind his relationship with the material world, casting aside all his earthly possessions. Everything that was is now lost in the past as he looks ahead to his first glimpse of enlightenment. Only now can he be free.

I step outside to check the weather and fill my lungs with morning air. I close my eyes and breathe. The image of your painting flashes in the dark of my vision. My body is wrapped tightly inside, fascia coming alive as my internal organs awaken and communicate with each other. I hold my breath longer than is natural. The need for air becomes too great to resist and I breathe again. I see it again, the face a blaze of color and feeling. I was there. I remember.

Driving into the bright morning sun I recall the last chapter of a book I read years ago by Leornard Cohen who said a monastery can be a lonely and dark place. He had too much time to think about his flesh and past relationships, all things he missed in the material world. What remained for him was only a few seconds each day to contemplate higher truths and enlightenment. How he tried to fit together his different layers of understanding, of yearning.

I pull down the visor to block the light. The churning in my stomach ceases. I speed up in anticipation of seeing your new art and feel my car careen slightly off-center as it scrapes the cement barricade of the bridge’s EZ Pass lane. With no concern for the damage, I find a soul music station as the morning sun spreads its golden light over the sparkling sea below. The barricade behind me now.

As I enter the east-bound ramp of the bridge, I remember you telling me that the subject in the painting hanging opposite my ornate mirror was a prostitute you’d met years ago. You asked her why she did it, how she kept her feelings safe. 

“Listen, my body is used a dozen times in a day. But I forget them as soon as they hand me the money and walk out the door. Except once, maybe twice, I remember, I was swept up, and one of them took me by surprise.”

You said you’d put down your brush when she said this. 

“Once a customer came in just to talk. I asked if he wanted anything else because he’d still have to pay. It was my time, you know.”

“No,” he said. “Nothing else. Just this.”

“I removed his leather jacket and shirt. I held him tight against me. We didn’t move. I didn’t and he didn’t, not once. When the hour was up I walked out with him, to see him to his car. I’d never done that before. He handed me a tip and a Post-it note he took from the dusty table at the entrance where the clay Buddha sits with the incense. On it he wrote, ‘I love you.’”

You stopped painting when she told you this, you said, and I listened. I remembered this as I crossed the bridge.

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