Dear Oil Paint
Your otherworldly movement and glow have enchanted me since the moment we first played together as children. Since then, I’ve been captured by your history, your beauty, and your mystery. The countless voices you’ve helped to carry across the breadth of time. Uncountable hours have been devoted to you, and I find myself in devotion too, to the stories you tell and subtlety with which you glide around any surface. You’re nearly perfect, your variety and complexity of color are like no other, and I find myself transfixed. But as I fix your body to canvas each time I am reminded of your danger, the secret rage within you that grows greater with each mark you make on my skin. You’re toxic, the slow-burning kind, the kind that sits quietly in the recesses of my body, and slowly moves towards my liver for an everlasting embrace. You make your home in me, my family, my fellow artists, and build your strength… stealing ours until we go mad or slip away with paint-stained fingers. You nearly killed both my grandparents. But still, we love you, I love you. You come baring guilts of Lead, Cobalt, and Cadmium, a bouquet of luscious white, blue and red, and I welcome you with open arms despite what I know. A friend warned me about you. They told me you used to bring yellow flowers until all your lovers died of arsenic poisoning. I wash myself thoroughly every time you touch me. You make me feel afraid. The red flags are mounting, and I count them, one by one. I hang up reminders about you and your danger around my house as warnings, little things, like gloves, a fan, acting as the thinly veiled guise of protection I flaunt against your anger that grows each time you kiss my skin. But the more I learn from you the more I empathize with that anger and only love you more. You simmer with ancient rage for tearing your pigments deep from the soil, the millennia of turmoil, trauma, metamorphosis, wars, and pain that has made you want you are today. As our love grows you reveal to me your mystery, the sweet soliloquies of history, and all I can do is love you more. I love you for that beauty, that pain, that rage, that perspective, and that danger that you hold so deep within you. So don’t love me less for admiring you from afar, for taking my time and distance from you when I need to, and when we touch I will tickle you from the end of my brush, and please know these gentle kisses mean all the same as my hands over your surface. I will always love you, but from now on I must protect myself.
Forever Yours,
Fia
