LJ Idol S11 Week 0: Intro
Bonjour. I do not speak French.
Once, in Paris, I hugged a woman who reminded me of the sun. She is bright and vibrant and her words can bring life and death. She's a ballet dancer and a lawyer and she walks through parks delighting in the world around her, bundled up against the gentle chills of Paris in the spring.
I like her. Someday I'll see her again, maybe.
I speak English. I walk through life a little sleepier, with a little less delight, but I try. I am not a lawyer or a ballet dancer, but once I took ballet lessons as an eighteen-year-old in a damp, feet-smelling room above the local hockey rink. I was told I did a wonderful job of making my dancing aerobic, and now I no longer learn dance. I am also no longer eighteen.
On my thirtieth birthday I rented a bouncy castle, some space in a park, and had my quite-grown-up friends out for a day of silliness and delight and we spun and danced on the grass. On that day I had not yet met my Parisian friend. Paris comes later, but not so much later that I have shed my skin of this day.
My father is a lawyer, too, although not Parisian by any generous stretch. He plays chess and I have flirted with the game on and off since childhood, captivated by his love of it and yearning to feel that same understanding. The pieces are always so intriguing and beautiful, the little roles they play in the story that always ends in one of three ways: a win, a loss, or a draw. There are no other outcomes. The king will always fall, the queen almost always sacrificed to his protection (or the assasiation of his enemies), and the pawn alone always has a chance to be something else. But in the end, the story is the same, played out in a hundred thousand possible ways. Played out to one, two, or three.
I do not play chess, either.
I drew my dad in Paris. He was with me after we met the woman like the sun, and we were sitting in an old stone square at the head of a neighborhood having a drink at a cafe. He sat for me and I drew him in pencils in my little travel notebook. Art, like writing, is a game of infinite variables. One stroke here or there, and the outcome changes. The meaning changes. Choice after choice after choice, not to struggle towards a win or eke out a draw from a set of bad circumstances, but to simply make. To make do. To make beautiful. To make real. To make honest. To make anew.
Now Paris is behind me and I am in the present in Wisconsin, where the leaves are changing and the ground is wet and heavy with autumn. It’s not cold yet, but it will be; a renewing promise, a snake eating its tail.
I don't play chess or dance, but I make art and I write words and I imagine outcomes four and five and six and seven: a world in which the queen lives and the king becomes the pawn. I craft dreams onto paper and paper into dreams, and I like it that way.
A word here, a word there, and the meaning shifts.
Bonjour. And now the story begins again.