What We Don't See

Each Tuesday, this blog features the work of guest writers. During the month of April, the contributors invite us to consider a collective point of view. Though the landscapes differ, the feelings conveyed address a universal longing—to be seen.
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We see your Payne’s Gray silhouettes on a veranda at dusk, accomplished artists whose cigarette embers gesture like drugged fireflies. We stand outside of your doorway, afraid—of committing to art, of grown-up things, of you who are married and have gallery representation. While we stand here and stare, light from the room behind us grows like a fringe of fire to illuminate our shame. If this were a comic book drawing, our instructor (with post-lunch garlic breath) would lean in and say Great contrast of light and dark. Dark being black clothing worn by every film student at CalArts in 1980. Dark being the ex-lax chocolate we ordered from Restaurant Anorexia’s menu.

Us in red and blue cowgirl patterned pants and yellow silk tanks without bras, our hair growing short from watching Jean Seberg movies at CalArt’s Bijou Theater. While you were out on that evening veranda talking low and oh so in the know, our skin turned orange from a carrot diet—we can’t stay away from color. Like sardines in a cliquish can, you have no need to move, and your edible bones will pile as one.

You have known each other through layers of careers, through 150 pound paper pages of artistic styles and mixed mediums. (Have you seen that British artist who draws a doll of herself crying fish sized tears that reflect the blues of heaven?) We will always stand just outside your door, until that day when you drop behind the file cabinet of our minds (although we will find you one day while cleaning).

You encircle us with smoke rings in our dreams, forever hear us murmur before stepping back and away. In the dream you will never have of us, our faces dance in a kaleidoscope. We are dolls of ourselves with webbed and plastic toes, dolls who grow nauseous from spinning, spit up on ourselves and shrug as we dance. String ties, bolero ties, men wearing eye liner. The art world when small is still a world—where the anti-cool dress in the colors of a rainbow that ends on a married professor’s bed.

_____

Edie Everette is an illustrator, teacher, and writer who drinks a lot of coffee in the Pacific Northwest.

He shoves his hand inside each of us, over and over again—barely looking in our direction. This goes on for about an hour or until his phone starts buzzing too often or his computer is about to run out of juice. Then, he rips himself out, pushes us aside, and jumps up from the bed. A few moments later, we hear rushing water: sips, swishes, gurgles, and spits. We hear corners of his towel slap the back of his bathroom door before taking its anointed place on a plastic hook. So high and mighty, that hook. It's never known what we've had to endure just about every week for the last fifteen-plus years (with some long stretches in between, all depending on the urgency of his appetites).

Someone took great care to make us look beautiful, to emblazon us with all sorts of enticing words and warm colors, to officialize us with all of those important charts and lists. People like him have to pay to take us home and enjoy all the goodness we so happily provide. It's never supposed to be all at once but gradually, he insists, like falling snow. Instead, we end up like fallen leaves.

When he's done with us, he pulls up the loops of that big gray bag he hides us in before he brings us inside his back door. With quick, jittery fingers, he ties those loops over our wounded openings in a halfhearted bow. If he doesn't take us right back out that door, he stuffs us down inside the little white trash can between his bed and his nightstand. So innocent, that little runt. So, while still awash in that fleeting joy we always try to give him, he can pretend we never existed.

_____

Tom Knauer is an attorney living in Tucson, Arizona.

Albert Ellis called it Musterbation. Thinking to ourselves that things “must” be a certain way in order for us to be happy. That things ought to be a certain way. Masterbation, Ellis said, is good. Musterbation, on the other hand, is bad.

We, in this club we never signed up for and would have refused to join had we actually been invited, have to fight off the urge to musterbate. We, who lie on couches or sit in wheelchairs or lie in beds sick. And tired. It’s hard for us not to say we ought to keep up. Hard not to say we must find a cure. Hard not to envy. Sometimes, if we look out our windows at the neighbors in their fancy clothes getting into cars to go to parties, plays, sporting events, we’re lucky if we can say, “Good for them.” Instead of tumbling. Some of us into memories of when we went out on the town. Some of us into despair that we’d never been able. We admit, it’s been a struggle, figuring out how to accept the truth of our left-outedness. To embrace our isolation.

But then, four weeks ago, the rest of the world joined us. The playing field became…wait for it…LEVEL. No one could go to restaurants. There were no parties or plays or sporting events.

Now we FaceTime or Zoom our happy hours with parents and friends, basking in the long forgotten feeling of being a part of everything, sharing our lives with each other, virtually toasting from our couches and wheelchairs and beds on a Friday afternoon. We ask, why haven’t we been doing this all along? Why did we just lay there with our books, TVs, dogs, and cats?

And then we remember. In the past—and when things return to normal—the others went out. And we were—and will be—alone.

_____

Dee Marie Kite is a writer who spends a lot of time on her couch in San Antonio. She is working on a memoir.

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