Gesso

Liquid white forgiveness. Thick, warm.....it drapes my canvases in layers of love, erasing the smeared and awkward. The crooked, the ugly....the failures. Plaster grace, gypsum clemency. I have canvases that have 3, 4...6 different paintings sleeping beneath the one that was finally accepted, hung, and purchased. The gentleman from Florida that took four of my forest series home with him has no idea that lying under the graceful branches of that shady path is a blackened thing. Angry. Two in the morning and four whiskeys and rage...it slumbers in the quiet of the woods.

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I've come to treasure that bottle of ivory exoneration. The morning after, when the tears have passed and the light filters through the curtains....I can start again.

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Mistakes. We all make them. Some of the landslide errors I've committed have decimated mountains. Tsunamis that have wiped my triumphs from the map...earthquake misjudgements leaving sinkholes and black chasms in my life. I've wept oceans, mashing palms into my eye sockets till there were bruises....redefined regret.
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Yet we breathe.

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The sun rises, the wind blows. Somehow the grass keeps growing and the dog needs fed and you pay the electric bill. We go on.

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So tell me....why do I still stumble so? You'd think that I'd learn to leave the light on, to watch my step. Sometimes I feel my snarls are simply hunkered down beneath the bed, festering. Am I going blind?

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Where is the gesso for life? Is there a magic pigment that will turn my monsters into ghosts? Take away their claws and give them fluff instead of fangs? I have faced them....I have paid. I am tired.

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It's not a quest for euphoria, I assure you. I'd settle for peace. I've known the mercy of the Lord, the compassion of friends...somehow though, the monsters are still there. Perhaps they live inside me.

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It's begun to snow again. Alabaster flakes blanket the mud and barren branches....gesso from the sky.