empty

if you open me up,
i'm afraid you'll find
i'm empty,
i'm empty inside

but where has it gone?
where could it hide?
i'm empty,
i'm empty inside

see, i lost my heart
the day he died
i'm empty,
i'm empty inside

so if you open me up,
i'm afraid you'll find
i'm empty,
i'm empty inside.

i'm not here.

i float through my days, feet never touching the ground. i float down my street, across the town and in my apartment where the ceilings are high, i float way up to the top.
and i'm touching everything with rubber gloves so i don't leave a trace - because i'm not really here.

i'm in 1988 playing scrabble with my father. 1989: raking up leaves on that interminably long driveway and my father is shaking his head at me while i am screaming about caterpillars, which truly frighten me. i'm in the garage in 1997: sitting in the front seat of the jetta, which itself sits on blocks, as my father takes apart the struts and shocks and puts them back together again from memory, only to realize he forgot a piece, so takes them back apart and puts them back together again, a second time.

i'm in 2007: a few months before he died, cutting and laying stick-on linoleum tiles with him in the tanning salon while visiting from florida. i am coming up with a good solution for fitting the angled end pieces, and i think he is proud of me for it. we always bonded over problem-solving. that, and our dry sense of humor... mostly enhanced by my mother's theatrical tendencies (which i also inherited, much to my chagrin.) but we had the common sense and the sarcasm to ourselves.

it was hard for him to watch me grow up. it was hard for me to watch him grow old.

so i'm not really here. i'm floating. i'll be back soon, but i just can't tear myself away.

nyc walk

i stopped walking at that moment. thinking about my father and how i always think about him when i smoke - or was it the other way around?

it was impossibly hot and humid outside and something about the moment, sitting there in the semi-dark, seemed ripe to get it all on paper... this intangible feeling.

i missed him - always would - and would welcome any moment to remember him.

across the street the sounds of basketball and sneakers stopping short on polished wood drifting out of a second story window brings me full circle to john wooden and his life lessons in threes. my father loved threes too.

it all seems to matter.

new piece and musings

i finally finished a new piece yesterday evening and here it is! i had picked up a book of rilke poems about three weeks ago and immediately started tabbing pages that seemed to inspire a visual.

this one was forefront in my mind, so here's the piece. i posted the english translation from the book on flickr.

speaking of art, i am trying to start the 12-step creative recovery program called "the artist's way". i say "trying" because the course has daily writings and homework that are about an hour per day and i just haven't made space in my routine yet. (although i have started reading the actual book). it just kept coming up in conversation and i have been feeling a little restless lately, so i hoped it might help me deal with whatever stands between me and a healthy sense of creative contentment and rhythm.

lastly, as the temperatures bob up and down, the highs are getting higher and i can tell spring is trying to arrive. it's been so long since i've lived somewhere with seasons (kindergarten) and there's something so magical about watching buds appear tentatively on long, skeletal branches and seeing rain on the forecast instead of only snow.

sorry for the long break in communication. hope everyone is well!
sam