frida-kahlo

leaving is not enough; you muststay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the lockseven on the house he__ nevervisited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtubfull of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearlyso arid. don__ wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problemsare papier mache puppetsyou made or bought because the vendorat the market was so compelling you justhad to have them. you had to have him.and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses,you make him call before he visits, you take a loverfor granted, you take a lover who looks at youlike maybe you are magic. makethe first bottle you consumein this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashionwith a knife and five cranberries.don__ lose too much weight.stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a manwith more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heartlike a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.

You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures.He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's.He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to.He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)

I am what the water gave me, / a smoke-ring in a jar, / the braided rope / my ladder-to-the-light, / my shivering bird heart / caught

Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.

My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.