The Persistence of Memory

Imastered the art of silent sobbing around the same time I learned how to draw. Occasionally, I locked myself in a closet just to wail out loud, but my lines were always straight. My spheres were toned, and my studies in value grew incrementally darker. I occupied the studio only at night and stayed until all my classmates were gone. Only then did I allow myself to unravel. After church, I sat kitty-corner from my mother at a breakfast diner every week. Somewhere between the pew and the booth I considered repenting. I thought about confessing. After a while, I snuck out of the house to kiss a girl on the lips but still wondered if I was going to Hell. The orange juice always tasted a little bitter after choking down the blood of Christ. My eighteen-year-old self was cracking. The guilt manifested both in my body and my artwork. I gave my ballerinas one eye and forced them to dance on a pile of old skulls. My lover stood naked while I painted her blue from the space between her toes all the way up to her tennis-ball breasts. If I pressed too hard and snapped a stick of charcoal, I lamented the broken pieces before tossing them aside and chanting amen, amen, amen. I perverted my mother’s romantic dream for me with two words. Even after we left church, the scent of incense lingered on my body, and even now I remain unclean. “I raised you in the church and I always hoped you would get married in it,” my mother told me. “I wanted you to have a real family.” I checked myself into a hospital and rated my own pain at an eight. The doctors performed an ultrasound on my belly but all they found was guilt kicking me from the inside. They gave me four types of pills and told me to swallow them when the panic came back, but usually I let it bubble in my body for a little while first. I wanted to know how long I could last before it lit me up from the inside. Then, I painted myself like Frida Kahlo after her third miscarriage. Nothing ever felt resolved. No matter how I positioned myself in front of the mirror in the studio, I could never see myself whole. Instead, I watched fractals of light break across my own face just like they did on my legs on Sunday mornings. I became the cubist version of myself. The sermon was never compelling enough; I preferred to watch the stained glass casting small rainbows onto the spines of wooden pews. Time melted away as if the clocks were Dali’s, and in this trance I prayed to end the persistence of memory. At the diner, my mother asked how I had become so damaged and disgusting. Was it college that had corrupted me? “I sent you there whole and you came back to me broken.” I practiced the art of silent sobbing while our waitress scurried between tables. I realized that if I held the tears between my eyelashes I could blur the diner into a scene crafted entirely of acrylic paint. The tables had a watery shine. The white hue of my mother’s knuckles could be applied with the blunt edge of my palate knife. The fabric of the waitress’ dress was smoothed down with a small sponge. The cracks between the floor tiles required my finest brush. The two eggs on my plate were convincingly imperfect and the yolk dropped off the canvas onto the top of my foot. The scene was still wet and so dan- gerous. I had to excuse myself from the breakfast table. In the bathroom, I soaked up my tears with toilet paper and then slowly stepped back to survey my masterpiece.