Past Transmissions: Death.

Thinking about the ones who've left earth a lot lately.
Torn between lonliness, jealousy, sorrow...so it goes.

I remember, vivid, how they told me you were gone.

A drunk on the corner told me. The feeling started in my chest and like a solar flare it spread to my shoulder blades, upper arms, down the blue and purple flowers of my tattoo, to my fingertips and out onto the pavement. It poured onto the littered brown cigar butts you had in your beautiful oversized lips not 12 hours earlier. My eyes exploded and that was that. Everything inside burned up while my skin stayed cool as a cucumber.
I was loading my guitar amp into a sticky floored, dimly lit nightclub when when he told me you were gone. I walked into a room of Asian pool hustlers betting on shots. I sat in a misplaced looking red chair in the corner of the room and placed my head in my palms. I pictured myself holding you from behind all those months ago. Beaded dread locks and the smell of tide wafting off your tie-died T-shirt. When I finally got off of that red chair my hands were wet. I rubbed and massaged the salty wet into my skin and it evaporated.
I read that you were gone.
I saw on the news that you were gone. A flash sentence then onto the weather. Its gonna be hot today, but he wont feel the sun on his broad tattooed shoulders.

Flashes of the last things they saw.
The constellation mural on his bedroom wall while the drugs pinched his toes and dragged him down into their furry little cave.
The cases of Dr. Pepper and Benson and Hedges 100's as the rope burn became the last sensation he'd probably feel against his skin.
The white tiled ceiling and the feel of crisp starchy sheets while morphine and pangs in the belly collided and made light.

You are no longer with us.
Last night I sat with you on a picnic table and stared at the lights of the buildings flickering off the lake. You said you weren't gone at all. That you were just away visiting family. Yet still in the stillness, I knew something wasn't right. You took my hand and placed it against your lips and I felt the hairs on my arm gently lifting and reaching for you. It was only when I surrendered to this that I woke, opened my eyes and briefly smelled your cologne spinning around with the dust in the air above my bed. Cigar smoke dancing in the fingers of light that reached in through my window. I felt a oneness in this moment like yesterday and tomorrow, ground and sky, my soul and yours, were all weaved in a soft little ball in my hand. I held and caressed this feeling. It was rare and beautiful like the cardinal that used to fly onto a tree in our backyard when I was young.
Just the same.
Red wings spread and caught the light like garnets.
And it was gone.

And this was ok.

-Jade

I will write until I sing again:

Today I chase a bus that doesn't stop.
Because I am not the center of the universe (contrary to my belief at this moment).
(Stop), I pause and take in the city.
Caked in a layer of grime. Exposed from being hidden under the freshly melted snow.

Sometimes I feel like this. Like my sparkly skin could just melt and reveal the grime that hides just millimeters below. That I might one day become transparent to you all.
(Waiting)
I sit on a wet tinker toy plastic chair in the bus stop.
Trying to get a glimpse through the glass
now almost opaque from the dirt that cars have splashed onto it.
(that could be an old lady that just passed...or a dog...I'm unsure)
Anyway, I sit here and I think this:

What is art without fans? Like a tree falls in the forest kind of scenario. If my art is never listened to, read, watched, appreciated. Does it really exist? Is there really any point?
We artists need validation as much as the next guy if not more. So does there come a point where without nutrition...our artist dies?
Once when I was very little I knew a man who I believed was a true, true artist.
This man chose his art over everything. Including sometimes, me. Which as a child I thought "wooooooow...his art must be sooooooooo important". He would wake up in the morning with music in his ears. That feeling that it must escape and tooth brushing and showering are just guards standing in the way of his great release. Days would go by with his door closed and sounds leaking out from under his door. I would sit outside like Christmas morning waiting for the door to open to see what he'd created. To see him again.
One day when I was much much older. This man stopped making art. Slowly it trickled out of him in smaller and smaller drops until one day he was dry.
And at that moment. One of my biggest fears as an artist. Was born.
See I knew why he went dry. Validation. How many years can you make art for just you? Fifteen minutes of fame breeze by you- you wonder if they even happened at all or if you just daydreamed it during a particularly bad hangover. But what IS art if there's no one there to see it?

Anyway I sat at this bus stop and I thought about my own artist and how I haven't seen her for 17 months. Since I last had a drink of alcohol. I've caught brief glimpses but nothing of real measure. And I wonder how long I can go without that relationship. And I miss her. And I hope she comes back soon.

Jade