Final Self

Thinking how every mark made represented another time, another me.

A couple weeks ago, I pulled a cardboard flat file, one of six, from the metal storage shelf in our townhouse garage, lugged it upstairs to the office/guestroom and began to unpack decades of artwork: sketches, finished drawings, collages, etchings, watercolors, artwork I’d made, going back fifty-three years. I found a sketchbook kept when I was twenty years old, a few years out of foster care, I found the first drawings I made of my baby son in his bassinet, some sketches of his father, now dead, collages I’d pieced together as he and I divorced, and several complicated portraits of the women in my life back then, when I was young and driven.

Lately I’d been wondering what to do with all the objects I’d created.

I can take old cutlery, baking pans, furniture, collectibles, old yet still wearable clothing, I can take that kind of stuff to a thrift store. Donate. But what to do with the faces I drew so long ago? Prisma color vestiges, flat on rag paper, people drawn “from life” as we used to say. I still remember talking together over the hours as they posed, in fading light. Or the darkness. Eyes looking outward, often at me, as I plotted my course on the page. Time spent translating the landscape of a human face. My favorite subject. Deep as the ocean. Shallow as two-dimensional space. Held on the page by a network of lines and the geometry of carefully placed negative space.

Carving up time. That’s what drawing has always seemed to me.

And now it was time to let it all go.

Recycle all of it; that’s what I decided: the hopes, the layers upon layers of finished work. Time to create in a new way. Long past lessons.

Now more than ever I am making it up as I go along.

That first box I unpacked held work that had been water damaged. I sat on the floor in my office, spread everything out around me, and began. Thinking, how every mark made represented another time, another me. Thinking, what to do with this now, who would want this when I was gone. Not wanting my work to be a burden, merely someone else’s trash.

I’d read that Swedish book on death cleaning. I knew the score. Why wait.

I grabbed a pair of scissors and began to cut away the damage from the mildewed images. Saved what could be saved, the mark making that still made sense. I cut and tore and pieced the leftover images together again rearranging what remained, slicing the damage off, and allowing the images to stay ragged around the edges, still useful, and like me recycled.

A foster girl grown old. Aged out and into my final self.

A woman who has learned to salvage what is worth keeping, to keep making, to save what is still of value, and to throw the rest away.