oro y plata

i make a bracelet and sell it to a stranger and now they have have a tiny slice of my time, of my hands, of my love. hana told me i should charge more for my taste but you can have it here for free. maybe someday i’ll be able to barter silver and gold and stories for a living and finally get to retreat from the clock factory of capitalism. i daydream of growing my own vegetables and living close to all my friends in a series of impossible contradictions. i chain together a necklace that is a poem and write poetry that ends up tangled. what is art, and who gets to make it? i want to talk to you about landscapes and portraits, but really, i just want to hear the timbre of my voice.

i show my dad’s girlfriend pictures of my trip to guatemala and she laughs at all the small moments i captured, the signs asking people not to pee on the street or spit on the floor, the inexcusable mountainside banner promoting vasectomia. every day i ask what is life, and what is art, and every night i redraw the fluctuating border shut like a sleeping bag. i used to joke that the way i live my life is my art because art is one thing one day and one thing another, but maybe my art is my integrity, my time, my care.

i’ve gone to four museums in the past two weeks and begged to be torn apart and stitched back together. good art will break your heart in hundreds of ways and leave you fuller than before. it is everything you can’t conceive of yet.

what sifts art from life is the act of putting yourself out there. of allowing your feelings to stumble into the light, drunk and disoriented, and tell yourself you’ll still be standing if they are crucified. love is a similarly precarious exercise. not all things are for all people, after all, but do i make things for myself or for the way i look in your eyes? if i show you the sublimated parts of me, are you still going to love me when they surface? museums are lovely but they initiate a conversation where no question ever gets answered. maybe i struggle to assign value to what i produce because my art is my love and in my love i am gooey and soft like lava. you can always be scalded, but in my flow state i’m just happy to make something pretty, and i’ll love it, even if you don’t.