They move around me, their warmth brushing along the sleeves on my arms folded across my chest, but I don’t feel them. Their voices are booming in loud whispers, bouncing around the various walls, but I don’t hear them. I know they’re there; it’s impossible not to, but I just don’t care.
I continue to stare at the two-feet by two-and-a-half-feet canvas in front of me. In the top left corner there are small red lines leading away from a center point. Light blue lines and sharp edges jet into the red like needles in a pin cushion. Following the light blue lines, the brushstrokes are visible as they turn a darker shade, almost black, in the bottom right corner.
I hate this piece.
More than the others, more than anything, I hate this piece. The red is supposed to suggest passion, aggression, hatred, and love; the blue sadness, cold indifference, and loneliness. The blue is supposed to pierce the red the way sadness jabs as passion, but they look intertwined. I hate it because I now understand that’s the way it has to be; melancholy overpowering life, but always intertwined with love for some reason or another.
As I continue to stare at it, I feel my grimace form, shaping my lips. My eyes move down the leading lines the way they were meant to.
“It’s beautiful.” The voice startles me out of my head, but I don’t jump or react. I barely move as I slowly turn my head to the middle-aged man on my right who’s at my eye level thanks to the harsh black heels I have on.
His eyes are wide and in awe as he stares at me. My face returns to its usual neutral. With a slight, deliberate nod of my head, I thank and acknowledge him; the most I can offer. His eyes surreptitiously scan my body beneath the black jumpsuit and take in the severe look I pose. When he meets my eyes again, there’s admiration, respect, and most noticeable, fear.
He admires me for my connection to the art world through my parents. He respects me for my carefully honed technique and large variety of artistic talents. He fears me for who I am: confident and uncaring.
My parents used to tell me of how I overpowered a room with my presence. It’s not simply my attitude, they used to say. I could be kind and caring, intrigued and devoting, and still have that same presence. “It’s simply who you are,” my dad said. “Harness it. Use it. But be careful with it.”
I was careful with it, but today I don’t care.
The man turns back to the canvas. “The use of line weight and over exaggeration of the brushstrokes emphasizes the emotion in the piece.” He takes an audible sigh. “I love the leading lines. The way they move around the canvas to keep the eye moving.”
I would roll my eyes if I cared enough, but I just turn back to the hateful piece. It’s too simplistic, and the sharp lines aren’t attentive movements of my wrist. They were fast. and I pressed to hard with the brush; I almost dented the thick canvas with the force.
My aggression on the piece and toward it today is evident. But I had a right to be mad. It was the first one of the collection; the one I made the night it happened. As I stand there remembering, I see myself making it, I feel what I felt, see what I imagined, and—
With another slight nod of my head, I moved around the wall to back, where an open space displayed sculptures on pedestals. I move to the one almost mirroring the canvas piece I just left, except this one is made of metal and clay. The red ball with all curved edges and no rough spikes is now in the center surrounded my metal bolts creating the base and trying to impale the ball.
Both materials are raw with no paint. I didn’t feel like masking anything; I made this one right after finishing the previous when I was too angry for delicate strokes and soft lines.
I move on, slowly drifting around the sculptures. In between pieces, I sometimes glance at the sign on the door leading into the gallery. “Feeling it all,” it reads in cursive print with “The next collection in the Movement Art Movement by Zaria Plasting” below it.
I can’t help but smile at the Movement name. My parents thought it was funny when they parented it. It was supposed to emphasize flow through the piece, drawing the eye around it. When they were asked to name this next step in artistic history, my mom said, “I mean, come on! The Movement Movement!” My smile fades with their memory.
As I make my way to another canvas, this one five-feet by twelve and named Feeling Their Touch, I try to ignore the viewers’ hushed and muttered questions.
“Can’t you feel her pain in this piece?”
I hope you never have to.
“This must have been awful for her.”
Still is.
“How did she get dozens of pieces done when it’s only been six weeks since it happened?”
I don’t know, I just did.
“Did she sleep?”
No.
“Do you think she got drunk while dealing with it?”
I’d never. Not after what happened.
“Do you think this one is about the accident itself?”
I get to Feeling Their Touch and try to imagine the handprints as theirs. Throughout the entire sixty-foot area, there are handprints in every color. Ranging from the deepest orange to the softest green, a variety of emotion are displayed across the canvas.
I start on one side where there’s a set of handprints in black, the only set in black or anything close. Those are mine. I walk down its length, looking at the texture my hands left on it. After the twelve feet, I see absence of paint in the shape of a two sets of handprints, the white canvas peaking through. Those are my parents’. No color. No life.
After pulling my eyes away from their absence, I walk down the wall until I get into another opening displaying a variety of things. Closest to me is a flower bouquet made of smashed alcohol glasses. The shards are adhered together, promising pain if one were tough it.
“This one goes with the Movement very well.” I turn to the approaching footsteps of a woman in painfully-high heels. When I meet her eyes, she nods to the bouquet in front of me.
“No it doesn’t,” I inform her, voice strong and factual. I’m not asking for a compliment; I’m stating fact where there is no opinion.
Her brows pull together, and she slightly tilts her head to the side. She’s asking a question with her expression, but I don’t answer things that aren’t asked.
“How so?”
I watch her face as she stares at the piece. I don’t need to look at it to know, so keep my eyes away from the glass.
I hate this one, too.
“The flow of the piece is only pointing in one direction: out. There’s nothing leading in. Nothing leading around. Nothing leading down.” I watch her eyes dart around the glass sculpture the size a chair. “Your eyes move around it because you want them to, not because anything is leading you there.”
This piece wasn’t about the Movement or even my parents; it was about something selfish, I don’t tell her.
Her eyes turn to mine, assessing, but I don’t care to be judged or to hear her opinion on the piece, so I move along.
Slipping through the open door and into the room on the room on the far side of the gallery, the alcohol fermentation almost makes me turn around. I look around, not seeing the people milling about, talking, assessing, questioning; I just see the words on the wall in bold print and the structures inside the room. I hear the flow of booze and mechanical slosh of a pump.
I walk to the largest one in the center and slowly circle it. At the top, beer pours out of a faucet, pushes down on the rock, slowly creating a dent overtime, and over the edge where is falls into a metal bucket, through a pipe, and is pumped to the top where it starts over again.
“Mommy. Why’s this one the biggest?” I hear from behind me, but I don’t turn around, I circle the structure until I can see the little boy from my peripheral.
The mom adjusts her grip on his hand and takes a hesitant step forward, not looking at me, just the shallow dent in the rock. “Because it’s the most important to her.”
“Why?”
The question makes me wince. It’s not just how I know the woman will explain to her child why because she doesn’t know I’m here. It’s that familiar question every child asks their parent.
“Why do I have to paint? I want to sculpt!” I told my mom.
She gave me a sympathetic grin and said, “Because it’s good to have variety.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to be a very skilled artist when you’re older,” my dad cut in.
“Why can’t I be one now?”
“You are,” my dad quickly said.
“Then why do I have to paint?” My mom gave my dad a look and he closed his mouth before telling me I didn’t have to paint. He was always so easy on me, and my mom knew it.
She turned back to me a smiled with slight amusement. “Humor me, will you?”
Painting is my favorite now. She taught me so many things about how to manipulate the paint, which brush to use when, which colors would make you feel what. She was the painter and my dad was the sculpture.
I blink back to the flow of beer and try not to hear the woman’s voice, but part of me wants to — needs to.
“It’s important to her because that’s what killed her parents.” I wince again, keeping my eyes trained on the beer. I can see it happening over and over again, exactly as it did in my head for the past six weeks.
“On their way home from an art exhibition,” she explains in a soft, calm voice, “a car of drunk young men slammed into her parent’s car.” I hear her stop and some rustling, so I look over and see her son clinging to her leg. “When Zaria Plasting got to the hospital after hearing of the crash, she asked what happened. In the news, they said the doctors told her the boys were driving from a party. The reports said they were drinking beer.”
And now my mom can’t paint and my dad can’t sculpt.
I mindlessly run my fingers over the rock, feeling the slide of the beer wearing into the rock the way it wears into decision making.
“Ma’am, you can’t touch the —” When I meet the security guard's eyes as I lift my head from the stone, he shuts his mouth and stops walking toward me. “I’m sorry, Miss Plasting. I didn’t —”
“It’s fine,” I tell him in an authoritative voice I didn’t know I was capable of keeping once that woman told her son my story. “You’re just doing your job.” I give him a small, mirthless smile. It seems to ease him, and he returns it and goes back to his post by the door.
I look over without turning my body at the woman with her son, who are both now staring at me. Admiration, respect, fear.
“I’m so sorry, Miss —”
“Please stop,” I tell her as I stick my hand up to silence her. “I’ve been isolated for the past six weeks so I wouldn’t have to hear those words. I know you’re sorry.” I don’t tell her I’m fine, because I’m not. I don’t smile, because it’s true. But she can hear the sincerity in my voice and see I’m not offended by the expression on my face. She gives me a tight smile and nods.
The only thing I do is look away, and what I see is some of the sentences in black and the others in red.
“In 2015, over 10,000 people died as a result of drunk driving,” one of them reads. On the opposite wall, “Drive sober or get pulled over” reads in big red print in a sea of black facts.
This room is the most powerful I’ve ever designed, but it doesn’t work with the Movement my parents created. It has everything to do with how they died and not how they lived.
It gets too much, and I leave the room, passing the same structures but one with red wine, another whiskey, and the one next to the door: scotch.
I walk without direction until I’m standing in front of my favorite piece. About seven-feet high and three-feet wide, the sculpture is pressed against the wall with dozens and dozens of sculpted hands reach out from the wall. At the far back, the hands are their natural shade of raw, red clay, and in the front, they’re bright red, bleeding. Gashes line the hands and arms closest to me, some with shards of glass in them. Glass from beer bottles, wine bottles, gin bottles, vodka bottles. On the plack to the right is the name: Feel the Pain.
There are many people in this gallery, so it doesn’t surprise me when someone bumps into my shoulder. I barely register it until that someone says, “Excuse me, Miss Plasting.” I turn to my left and have to look up to meet the tall man’s eyes. His smile fades infinitesimally, and he pauses. “I would like to buy the piece labeled Feeling—”
I don’t wait for him to finish. “It’s not for sale.” I turn my head back to Feeling the Pain, but I’m not really seeing it anymore.
“I’m sorry.” There it is again. “I thought this was a showcase for buying—”
“It was, but it’s not anymore.” I look up at him again and finally understand why I wasn't walking around introducing myself, explaining the different aspect of each piece, why I wasn’t being the proper host as I was taught to be since my first showcase when I was nine. “Excuse my, sir.”
I walk my usual mindless strut until I’m standing in the front of the gallery. “Excuse me, everyone!” I shout so the whole space can hear me. I wait only moments for everyone to come to where they can see me. “If you’ve realized thus far, I’m not the Zaria Plasting you’ve known since my parents had me, but forgive me for not being sorry for it. This is because of recent events as you all know, but it shouldn’t have gone this way.” I swallow, assessing my words. “I will not be selling any pieces you see here today.” I ignore the loud gasps and what? from someone in front of me. “They’re not what my family would’ve wanted, and I will not tarnish their memory by adding work to their Movement that should simply not be there.
“I have isolated myself to grieve for their loss, but I lost myself there, too. Throughout the course of today, I’ve realized just how far in myself I was buried.” I pause, digesting this myself. “For the past six weeks, I’ve been creating art as a way to get my emotions out, something my parents taught me, but I’ve been too absorbed in their loss, I haven’t relished in their life.
“I don’t want this stage in my life to be burned into the history of the Movement Movement simply because I was a child of it. Following today, I will return to my family’s child. Thank you all for coming, for indirectly helping me realize something this important, for helping and supporting my parents.”
With that, I walk through the crowd until I’m standing in front of that piece with the red and blue intertwined. Melancholy shall always be intertwined with love, for one reason or another. My reason is parents, and I’m okay with that. Now. I’m okay with that now.