I did this piece really, really fast. I was trying to prove to myself that I could be as good as one of my favourite artists, John J Muth. But I'm just not. Yet. He has a fluiditiy with watercolours that I have never seen anywhere else. I can't match it, though my watercoluors are sometiimes of the same quality (I have since equaled and perhaps surpassed his work. If your tastes are akin to mine own.)(

I can tell that he does his works very quickly and it is that speed that lends the works their power - his confidence and surety. He illustrated a few comics, though no great ones. It sucks when the writing doesn't match up to the artwork. Kirsty's nose isn't that pointy, but her body IS that nice. Well it was the last time I saw it, anyway. Which was a while ago now. Sigh.

I wrote this late in 2002, and it still twists inside me if I read it. I lost her. Ah well.

 

‘lo everyone

12 o’clock tick tock how long is it how long have I got?
Midnight on a Sunday. Not too bad a day really. I am high a lot lately. I think it may have something to do with the pressure, but I also come down pretty hard every day or two and feel miserable and suicidal and hopeless and want to cut again. Which I haven’t.

It has been very hard being without Kirsty (to those of you who do not know, we have been together for about hm no idea 8 months properly, and she has just moved

Out.)

We have/had the advantage (? Is it? Mostly…) that because I work at home and she is a student, we are (were?) in each other’s nice warm pockets all day and it is not fun suddenly being without her. She is very good to me and I miss her so much.
Though it is hard to tell as we cannot divorce bipolar from our intrinsic selves, if there is any difference, I think it has been our respective illnesses that have led us to this. She has bipolar as well. She has been down for the last 7 months or so and has only just surfaced. Though she was strong and never stopped trying, it has led to some real problems, some friction, some precious time and love lost between us.
I was down too as some may remember, for many months earlier this year. Perhaps, I think, we tried to protect each other too much from the extremities of our illness. The despair burned something between us that was rare and beautiful. We were for a long time able to share our pain and hold each other through the worst of this curse, and it was something that I have never had before – that level of understanding from another. Another sufferer, another of us, the cursed, the edge-walkers.

After so long, too long, I don’t know. The hopelessness that we each felt became something that we did not or were not able to fight together anymore. And I feel responsible, I do, it was me who broke down in the end despite all my strength.

I asked her not to tell me anymore of how bad it was.

It does not seem such a cataclysmic thing, I know. But it is. It led to too much falling away between us. She didn’t know and couldn’t know how much to tell me. She was afraid for me and in a little while she started to do what she had done her entire life with all the other stupid fools who had her love and lost it. She started to pretend.

I tried I know that I did. I helped her as much as I could as she started university and worked through and succeeded despite her crippling despair, despite the pure bipolar depression that made her every movement an exhaustive effort. She was so frightened of even going there every day, but she made herself and passed it all for her first semester. And she never gave in and cut though I know that she wanted to. I know now that she was crying by herself a great deal of that time, but I had asked her not to tell me anymore, and so. She did not. She hid her tears from me and cooked for me and washed my clothes and tried to keep the house clean.
The terrible thing is that I let her. I tried to tell her it was ok and she could come to me but I know that I did not try hard enough, not in my heart. Because I was drowning too.

By the time the despair had lifted - as much as it ever does, we had become separated from each other, even though we still made love and held each other every night. What the invaluable thing was that held us to each other so tightly and kept me alive last year, it was just – gone.

So. Last week she left and moved back in with her idiot mother.

Now I have to work so hard… I do, this exhibition is the biggest and best thing I have ever done – I have to work so hard and if she was here and we were trying to heal the sores between us, then I would give her my time. I can’t. I am working every second that I am awake, and if she was here I would try and make it all ok but be doomed by the fact that right now everything that I have must be focused on my work, and I could not help but resent her for it. She knows this, and so she has volunteered to have no contact between us until after the show. I know that she doesn’t want to stop seeing me completely, to not try anymore…

She is right, of course. It is just such a sweet and selfless thing to do.
I don’t know if we can ever find again where we were and what we had, now that things have the slight but poisonous taint of my own selfishness and its consequences.

I shall find out, in time. We kill time, time buries us.

And in between I must PAINT.

If anyone wants to see how I am coping with it through my work. There is my webpage. It is true, it is the truth, that there is no way to hide what you are and what is inside you when you must be creative despite and of course because of what is happening in the searing wildness of your mind. In your broken heart, your broken, broken heart.