Sketch

Misplace your things.

Shadow Man (1963) by Remedios Varo

Wake up running, carving a dark line down the stairs, out the front door, and into the frozen yard, leaping over bushes, bouncing into the crunchy grass, oak branches glowing orange, high above your empty head. Fill your face with frost and sunrise, fill it with crispy leaves and tangled branches, nature’s cluttered rooms, the planet’s tall gray ceilings, the morning’s flocked wallpaper, blue jays and mocking birds diving into the day.

Wake up half-erased, trace these remaining lines and forget the other ones, I can’t remember them, can you? Wake up sketchier, all reckless curves and hasty edges, no background, no foreground, no fill, just jagged black improvisations like branches against a white sheet of sky. The night crept in and stole your collection of ancient regrets, disparaging remarks, discouraging thoughts — unsorted, unnerving, unnecessary — and gave them to the birds. Now they’re noisily making nests out of your repeating themes, tittering at the absurdity of I was never enough and I will never be somebody, shredding up the sharp brambles of your words until they’re soft and fleecy, a bed for blank babies with wide open mouths to the sky, anxious to collect their own disillusionments and disappointments.

Teach them how to erase these lines each morning instead, show them how to misplace their favorite failures, to forget what they decided before, to lose track of the pointy lessons they imagined were so important, the hard corners designed to bruise their knees and box them in. Show them how to wake up mid-stride, already out the door, losing the thread as they dash across the frozen grass, shaking off the moral to the last story, outrunning the previous plot.

Each night the darkness makes off with your vanities, your resentments, your ludicrous inventions. Don’t go looking for what you lost, gathering up frayed dreads and faded hopes. Wake up in the vaguest shape possible, a loose outline, rough jumbles of ink, a chaotic blur of pointy elbows and long legs with no eyebrows, no fingertips, no second glances, no second thoughts, endless second chances. You don’t need vivid stories or polished explanations, you don’t need carefully shaded sales pitches and glossy excuses. Splendor is half empty and half erased, still stretching, half collapsed, messy mistakes forming a loose outline of belief, a faint sweep of faith, a gentle curve of surrender, fluid gestures of praise for the boundless sky.

If you wake up early enough, you’ll catch a glimpse of the night stealing off with your treasured collection of missed opportunities, your hoarded defeats and abandonments. You might grasp for those familiar frustrations, reaching out for the structured solace of old sorrows, ancient rejections, mangled dreams. Let them slip away instead — no sorting, no organized reckoning, just less and less, just the open air of forgetting.

Here you are now, in the cold dawn, a sweep of charcoal across the textured parchment of sky, a curve of motion in the morning air, the black arc of a single intention, the most important piece you never lost, the peace you never lost, you were never lost, you never lost. My heart is a black blot of ink here, at the bottom of the page, more of a statement than a question. I know you now. Here we are.