Unos Cuantos Piquetitos

The two cups of coffee I have already had really put me right on the edge. It really makes me angry to see so much human emotion go to waste, Friducha.

Today, let us put on our suits and ties, and walk into the world with all our womanness blazing: (in your case, never wasted, never)

Let us have a drink then another for both legs, even if you must remain seated, even if legs isn’t exactly right, (but I feel you would love the joke)

(when I saw the picture of you for the first time, posing with your family in your father’s suit, in a book, for a school assignment, I immediately knew what kind of girl you were,

the same as me. And although you were a painter, and I, a writer, there was the moment of recognition)

It doesn’t always happen, you know, some breathtaking artists and writers, but you feel an adoration that is remote and intellectual.

Those who hit us on a gut level are the ones that make the blood rush to our heads or elsewhere, they are perhaps not the most technically perfect or immaculate, or the most formally accurate, or the ones who create the grand mural or the magnum opus, but they can be those painting their minuscule twelve by fifteen inch studies of their faces, almost camouflaged into the bigger painting, but there she is, if you look closely.

Don’t you just love how Virginia is outraged by the price of eggs in her journal? The mundane, the domestic, the day-to-day living, the secular, while the men thought their really big holy thoughts?

The thought can contain the whole universe, even if it is thought of while boiling some eggs. And because of that, there can be the aspect of reality, of recognition, because it is thought right in the middle of living life and not in the musty office with the large house plant whose leaves need dusting.

Come to think of it, that is exactly like my own house plant beside my desk, but my room isn’t musty, it is full of life and things that inspire me and make me smile (kind of like how you liked to decorate your bed, when the bed was where you had to spend most of your time), pictures of my family and postcards and important books and knick-knacks that make me feel connected, so that when I feel lonely (ya no estoy sola) I have something to remind me that indeed I am not.

You liked to have a clean and tidy house. It isn’t the most repeated nor the juiciest story about you. I like things to be clean and tidy, too. One can be many things. One can participate in the kitchen and not have to be contained to it, there is no kitchen crowd and den crowd now, unless we ourselves want to make that distinction, and sometimes we do. But sometimes, when your artwork is conversed into instantly recognizable funny emojis to be used at the beginning or the end of a sentence, well, I don’t know if we are taking this familiar and participatory time of ours a tad far. (But I must admit that I, too, went online searching for these images, wanting to see what they looked like, and it could have been worse, the artist is someone who loves you, and maybe that is the most we can expect, that it is someone who loves us, who performs the surgery.)

Who knows, maybe you would have loved it. I know it is something Warhol would have applauded.

I was never one for making nice dinners, but sometimes I like it. And I buy pretty napkins just in case. I don’t have long hair, I used to, but I cannot French braid my hair or put flowers in it, so what’s the point, and my man (mi Diego) tells me he likes my head all exposed. I think it is because he has such a hard time deciphering my mind, so he likes to at least be able to look at it.

(Isn’t what I am doing a kind of reduce as well, not perhaps as painstaking or obvious as with the frimojis, but the basic idea is the same; my Frida, and not someone else’s, mi Frida?) (And isn’t that how we, as appreciators, like to think of ourselves, that it is only we who truly understand what the artist really meant? A kind of club for the select few, like the Bloomsbury Group, and how crazy is that, but look at us now, no one communicates with anyone, but through our damn smart phones? No one asks hey did you see that, or did you hear the news, no one talks about the news, all the talking is done in the form of thrashing, on Facebook?)

Got to roll with the punches, they say. But I am doing the best I can. I saw some of your artwork, a long time ago, it was 1997, when I went to see the exhibition with my sister.

To love so much it overpowers the hurt. We all have our own prices to pay. Not to love is easy. But to love, just do it, even when the object of our love has done nothing to deserve it. That is the test.

I am sorry it was so hard for you. Life. Living in pain all your life. But I don’t think you would want me to be sorry, but happy. Pity is best saved for pitiful. And you were anything but. Your life, it was also marvelous, precisely because it was hard. You are marvelous, magnificent. And you loved with all your heart. That is more than anything. It is never wasted, never. We all should be so lucky as to be allowed to experience to love another like that.

Yesterday wasn’t a good day for me, Friducha. I cried and cried, and finally, when I was too exhausted to cry anymore, I got angry with myself, feeling that there was nothing, that it was all a waste, that I was wasting myself, that all I had were these intense emotions, and only hollow walls around me, echoing my stupid pain in the most hopeless and desolate tones.

But then a face appeared before me, the face of someone I love, who told me that this was something people who write go through, that this was the price, nothing more. That in a few days I would get my sleep back, and wouldn’t take things to heart like this anymore. I didn’t want to listen just then, but made him angry with me instead. I read somewhere once a description of people like me, who, once their passion is stimulated, become emotional hemophiliacs; there is no end to the feeling gushing out until they have emotionally bled themselves to death.

Why it has to be so hard, I don’t know. But the hard is what makes the struggle worthwhile, it is what makes the blood flow faster in our bodies, to make us blush and warm with heat, or rush back from our limbs to protect the heart, if there is danger there.

I love someone, Frida, and I don’t know if it is the kind of love to overcome all obstacles, to rise above the lovers and become its own entity. But that is what it feels like to me. It is the love that stabs us, that marks us its own, that makes us its slaves, but that makes us stronger, too, precisely because it makes us so vulnerable and bare.

He or she who is brave enough to love, can take on anything. Even when the pain is unendurable. I can’t say if that is what you meant, but that is what I take from your body of work.

Arbol de la Esperanza, mantente firme.