Chapter 5 #4
“Before I went to RISD, I knew that drawing did something for me,” I tell Kai.
“It was my drug, you know? I could pick up a sketch pad and suddenly I was somewhere else. But when I got to college, I realized that someone else’s art could change my mood, too.
The Black Place was the first painting that had that effect on me. ”
Our sneakers slap against the hot ground.
And then, just ahead, it is there—-an undulating current of gray hills that seem to materialize from the scrub surrounding them.
In some spots it looks like lava that has dried.
In others, like a herd of elephants standing back--to--back.
There is hardly any vegetation, just hummocks of black and near black and once--black that cave toward a midpoint.
“She painted it between the Depression and the Atomic Bomb tests in Los Alamos,” I say.
We had learned in class that O’Keeffe drove a hundred and fifty miles here, to the Badlands.
She camped in her car and painted a dozen versions of the same spot, as if she were trying to capture something that she couldn’t quite nail.
But the allusion is clear: There are always shadows.
They have a seductive pull; one must battle to keep from giving in.
For me, O’Keeffe’s most famous iteration of this place was clearly the image of both depression and survival. “Sometimes,” I tell Kai, “I think if you cut open my heart, it would look just like this.”
I am vaguely aware of Kai letting go of my hand, and when I look down, he is on one knee. “You can love something with shadows,” he says.
Suddenly everything clicks for me: the jewelry box he rifled through, the contact card for Ximena on my computer screen, the contents of the gym bag he was hiding from me. It was never about him trying to find out who I really am.
It’s worse.
Kai’s hands cradle a ring box. “I love you, k’aalógii,” he says plainly.
“I love that you first told me you loved me in your sleep. I love that your favorite piece of clothing is my sweatshirt. I love that you stress--clean. I love that when you put new tea bags in the canister, you take the old ones out first and put them on top so that they don’t feel like losers.
I love how you can take a blank piece of paper or a white wall and make it gorgeous.
I love everything that makes you you.” He smiles, a wide white flag of surrender. “Marry me, Georgia.”
I want nothing more than to sink into the valley behind me, where the hills are knuckled together. I love Kai, and that’s why this is killing me.
Kai cannot marry Georgia Gilligan. Even if he never finds out that my real name is Eloise Ambrose, that I am married to another man, I will know.
When you love someone—-when you don’t want them to be hurt—-you let them go. I am an expert at it.
I stare at this man, who has shared five years of my life, who made me believe there is a version of the world in which I do not wind up alone, who taught me how to trust again.
I memorize the shape of his jaw, the slant of his cheekbones, the texture of his hair.
Like O’Keeffe, I will paint him dozens of times, and never get it right.
I brace myself. Gently, I close the ring box. “I can’t,” I say.
Life goes on, doesn’t it? It may not be the life you wanted; it may be something you drag through daily, with apathy or anger or dread, but it keeps going.
Even after skyscrapers collapse and parents die and you rip out a piece of yourself to say goodbye, you wake up the next morning, even when you wish you wouldn’t.
Although Kai and I returned from our trip to New Mexico to the same shared apartment, I think we both knew that there had been a seismic shift.
I had made up some excuse about not feeling ready, and Kai had said he understood.
But everything had changed. We did not break up as much as dissipate.
Kai switched shifts so that he was gone when I was home.
In a few months, when our lease was up, Kai suggested that maybe he should move closer to the station.
Him, not us.
I got an apartment across town, where I was less likely to run into him. Even now, after nearly a year, it still hurts.
Every day is like the last one. I get up, go to work, come home.
I go to therapy and refill my meds and take them religiously.
Sometimes I FaceTime Ximena, sometimes I just sit on the couch and watch the Real Housewives.
I feel as numb as I did when I was first diagnosed and my lithium dose was too high.
But it’s better this way.
Sometimes when I pass a reflective glass window, I wave or make a face. Sometimes I don’t move out of the way when a tech bro is barreling down the street toward me on his phone. Sometimes when I’m on MARTA I talk to myself out loud, to see if other passengers turn at the sound of my voice.
In every important way, I have to move through the world with the intent of never leaving a mark on it. But these? These are my small acts of rebellion.