Date Unknown — January, perhaps 

 

      I didn't know when her face fixed itself upon my mind, only when I noticed it had been there. The picture sat not as some romantic dream, nor as pure altruism.

 

      It was a Polaroid, familiar, interlaced with someone unknown—like a thin piece of glass—reflecting back a life and what lay beyond it. 

      I want to care for people of this kind, though, thoroughly aware that my concern is partially a desire for someone to care past my conditions. For most, survival is mandatory: wholeness is not.

​

      After a gap semester, I resumed with Figure Drawing 113. Looking back, all the classes have amorphized into a singular idea of an art school class. I do remember choosing a seat next to the locked windows. One day, I'll have a key made and let in some fresh air, let the stale paint breathe. The group around me was ordinary people in different, incomplete ways.

      The circle around the naked model made the other side distant. She sat at the polar opposite of the room. In my head, I nicknamed them Ava (ah-va), like short for Avant-garde. Their attire was often black, baggy, with punches of color speckled around, eyes without eyebrows, and frizzed hair–people with hair too silky felt manufactured. 

      Anyway, the professor asked for music to play while we worked. The fear of having to listen to music I despised outpaced my impulse for anonymity, and I spoke immediately. Her eyes flicked my way–at the doctors, my mother and I broke records for our eyesight, the tiniest line at the bottom was a breeze to read—and if this genetic disposition didn't exist, the attention may have gone unnoticed. There are days I wish so many details never registered. 

      That semester marked an internal shift; an attempt to keep my distance. I crossed the line from youth into something like middle age—this new attempt at attending college left me feeling naked, with only a vague concept of what a professional artist looked like. All black attire, except my orange rawhide shoes. Even my posture became deliberate: seriousness without invitation, yet I am an unserious person, my aesthetic bordering on pretentiousness. More likely, I simply wanted to insulate myself from fears, fears of love, fear of memories that won't slip into darkness. Though any artist wishing to make a career must remember past romance, art is ring-fighting: intellectually, aesthetically, and unforgiving. The difference between discipline and avoidance is thin. 

​

      A little more into the semester, Ava moved and became a semi-permanent fixture next to me. Though often not committed to the idea of interacting. Headphones blaring or a cell phone propped up absorbed into some Phoenix indie film. Films with rapid montages of women, eyes, red lighting, and empty stomachs. After another series of interactions, talking, sudden aloofness, splitting cigarettes, discussing odd taste in art–some too controversial to mention, even in my own personal journal–I'd gamble that for her fear of closeness, of engulfment, fought viciously with the desire for proximity, if not outright intimacy.

      One day, she was engulfed, hunched over, watching something I can only call TV static, in the midst of ODing. It hit me. She reminded me of Riley. An uninvited recognition. No one likes to be compared, so this remains part of my internal world–everyone deserves to be experienced on their own terms. Riley was a friend and a brief lover, a forest of a person. Riley — in college, the first time—shared my art tastes and appetite for loud music. It all peaked right before she dove out of a moving car, screaming she was the queen bee of a hive. With her mom. Ms. Brodley explained how we wouldn't be seeing Riley for a while. 

      Late at night, when no one is around, and the mirror catches enough light to reflect my image, these feelings swim to the surface. How have I not met fate the same way as so many friends? Was I the one sensible person in a house of insanity, or did I just learn how to perform functionality better? 

​

      As Ava peered into her blue screen, no pity came out of me, only tenderness. A tenderness I never told her. Was my restraint caring, or was it simply a way to patronize without guilt? My own recurrent aloofness…I have left so many people alone to bear the burden of ambiguity. An ambiguity, I’m praised for in my work. 

      What darkened the circles around my eyes wasn't the chance I misunderstood her, it was the chance I saw and recognized the pain, and still chose it to be unseen. Uninhabitable in our own ways. 

      As I sit in this position called the future, I am certain of how this all starts. Often, I assume it with too much of a fight. Ava spoke once about her disdain for cigarettes, especially the brand her father smoked. The brand my mother smoked. And as I inhaled hard, billowing out fumes, my eyes went to a downcast scrunch.

      Ava wasn't the first to do this; if I kept count while in college, it would leave me with less sleep than what little I already get. My indignation towards the role stood tall; only recently have I begun to let it slip. Most of me asks now, how much I enjoyed its benefits; fortified, essential, and untouchable. My opinion towards the role hasn't changed, but my responsibilities are clearer. 

​

      Nonetheless, encounters with Ava led to an inability to envision a friendship. Unproductive, one might say, and I guess they felt the same. If there was any blame to shovel out, I don't know about it. All I know is that my own habits are not easy to understand. The year moved on, she took a gap semester, and the image of her passed into some deep crevice. Parallel lanes in this large small city. 

​

      Then we saw each other again.

​

      At Contact, another little piece to this puzzle called Phoenix. She was among friends immersed and grooving to the music, a dancing that spoke of inhibition. As the rhythm and I became acquainted, she crossed my vision from the opposite side of the club.  In the dim red light, she looked well. Their eyebrows dark; a fitted black dress with underlaid red; and the general nonchalance of a person inhabiting their life rather than surviving it. I was genuinely happy for her. A bit of pain as well hit some place in my chest, slightly above the sternum. As a doctor, I would diagnose it as an invented narrative, dislodging itself.

      Just then, with the slightest touch, a graze only a man riddled with anxiety would've noticed, a lady bumped into my back with her hand. I looked, and she apologized. 

      I went back to moving and looking at the band, and largely got lost. A part of me did want to say hello. To acknowledge a history, however brief and sporadic, may be out of the belief that time softens memory. Or recognition is simply one of those moments that harkens to our inner child, I do not know. And the rest of me did not. Fear of being seen, seen for something I might not be, seen through a narrative I may have no control over. An unscripted life isn't new to me, but I've lost my love for adventure.

      In the end, I danced and made myself unremarkable. Talking to people that risk nothing and have nothing to gain. 

      Late into the night–ready to sleep, as I was leaving–the music drew me back in. One last little listen to satiate me. Now packed, I stood and wiggled around. Her head popped up, a few rows ahead of me. Suddenly, I felt conspicuous; if she turned, how would that look? The crowd packed around me, and I figured lowering my eyes and dancing was my best option. A path cleared, and I watched her and her group leave the floor. Relief came, and a touch of something akin to remorse. But the tunes were white hot, and the thoughts slipped away into the dark.

      A few songs passed, and I moved up to the point where I could get to see the DJ work his magic, and in the middle of anticipating a beat drop, two hands grabbed my arm. Not a snatching way, like someone catching their balance. 

 

      It was her. 

 

      As our eyes met, I must have looked startled. Though I've been told most of my expressions pass for judgment. That must have been how she saw it. Ava looked, said hello promptly, and let go of me. I stood back and returned the greeting, assuming she was passing through. As she crossed in front of me and disappeared into the thick pack of people, I didn't know what to make of it all. 

      With a body caked in salt from all the sweat, satiated musically, furrowed eyebrows that reflected a sense of an endless story, I left. Not tragic or sublime, just unresolved.

      As a child, at wave pools, I would catch a swell to pretend to bump into my crushes. Afterwards, I'd be too nervous to make it past an apology and swim away. This sits with me, how early we learn to deadlock our needs and our fears.

 

Afterwards, I thought about the classes, the near-misses, tight dresses, two people, exile, and dim red lights.

 

That's when I began this drawing.