Feng Shui

I need a quite place to paint. A private place, where my amateur paintings will be safe from critical visitors. A place where I can be creatively naked. My room seemed like a logical place. So yesterday, I rearranged my room, creating a three by three foot “studio”.

My room is now arranged exactly like it was the day I moved into this old house. My bed is scrunched into the corner, like vegetables pushed to the edge of a child’s dinner plate. On one side of my bed is a wall dominated by two large windows. Through those windows, I gaze at the moon and the stars…or the clouds tinted orange by the city lights, as i drift off to sleep. On the other side of the bed, is a metallic filing cabinet, filled with journals and trinkets. On top of the cabinet is a lonely wooden touch lamp. Underneath the lamp, my clock radio glows, and sings me to sleep. My books are a small tower: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Azar Nafisi’s, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and God’s, The Bible. At the foot of my bed sits a wooden chair with faded moss green upholstery. On it's lap rest my backpack. One of my bright yellow paintings hangs at the head of my bed. My carpet is a twisted jungle of green and gold shag.

I have rearranged my room before. I arranged it for Her, for Us. My bed was in the middle of the room so that we would both have an escape route for late night trips to the bathroom. That old kitchen chair was my night stand. It held books written by Herman Heese, Jack Keroauac, William Burroughs, Richard Braughtigan. Her night stand, was the silver cabinet. It was always littered with hair pins--and a tall glass of water. Periodically I will find one of those hair pins in a dark corner of the appartment. On the wall i had tacked up a chinese tapestry she had given me. It depicted a two headed god dancing between bamboo shoots. The carpet was always covered by our disguarded clothes. Her night bag was somewhere in that pile of clothes. Above us, the moon light would rush through the window. I remember Her as a silhouette in the cold winter moon light…whispering. We would stay up into the early morning talking about saving the world. At the foot of the bed was the bedroom door. In the mornings we would do everything possible to avoid walking through that door. We savored the warmth of the blankets, the warmth of each other.

Last night I was unexpectedly flooded by the memories of Her.
Those memories felt old, ancient, as if they were somebody else’s. Laying in my bed, now pressed against the wall, surrounded by the warm glow of my bedside lamp, I felt new, fresh, like I did when I moved in--like i was ready to start walking through life's doors.