This is my Blue Period. Everyone has a blue period. Picasso’s best friend killed himself, that’s what got him so depressed. I heard it was over a woman, maybe a story of one-sided love, but either way, that was his best friend.
They were living on the streets of Paris. Getting drunk, getting high, talking life, talking death, talking love, talking about beauty to beautiful strangers, making love, making art. All day and night, living that life of the artist. Having nothing, having everything, the whole world at their fingertips.
I never understood why sadness makes you cry from pain and beauty at the same time. “Life is beautiful!” you want to scream and stab yourself with a knife. Maybe that’s what people don’t understand, how art is sad because sadness is beautiful.
We wait our whole lives waiting for love and a bus that just ain’t coming. You can’t sit around and look for it, you know what I’m saying? You gotta go through the fire to get to the flame, and when you hold it in your hands and you can either light yourself up or hold it up for others to see the darkness. You light the darkness either way.
The female nude’s clitoris. Edge and form of black lines, secret folds of the flower. Weeping, the most unguarded he ever saw her, twisting cigarette-ends together for a smoke, some relief from all of this reality and need money for wine or candles, bread, no cheese, cold water, no heat, nothing but each other and the hopes and dreams.
His man was in love with her, but he was a cripple. Maybe they kissed once. Maybe he was just a friend. Maybe she even loved him. They were both painters, Pablo and his man. Picasso flying, his man stuck to a wheelchair. Pablo’s humongous eyes staring intensely at angles of cheekbone and jawline, hexagon in her eyes, the shadow of the café lights on her cheek, warm skin, cold light, naked and breathless in some other room. His man’s loading up the revolver, and finally putting a bullet in his head right across the table.
Pablo saw him in his dreams; he saw him in his nightmares. He talked to his spirit and lived with his ghost; his soul was in hell, but they remained friends until the day he died.
My ex moved in with a Dominican guy. Some guy she met at the Double Tree where she was working after she dropped out of pre-med, he was a valet or busboy or something, older guy, maybe 30, like ten years older than her or some shit. I met him once, me and her in the parking lot smoking a cigarette, her telling me to stop coming around when she’s working, telling me that I had to let her go, and then this Dominican cat with white pants and douchebag sunglasses rolls up and asks if everything was okay.
I didn’t see her for a long time after that. A couple years. She moved out of that small room in Edison, NJ and moved in with him, and I only saw her once a couple years later, at the diner where I worked at, and she was alone but still with him, and she came by to give me our pictures that she found, said she was going to throw them out, thought I might still want them, how was I doing?
How was I supposed to tell her how I was, endlessly working on the painting I’d spent the last two years on, to show her?
How can I describe her in a way that shows how I loved her? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? This is my promise to you, my love for you, to paint this picture so beautifully you’ll know how much I loved you.