my ex just called to ask if the divorce "inspired" me
he saw a photo of one of my pieces somewhere online and wanted to "check in." nine years together and he genuinely thinks my work is about him now. like the last four years of me learning how to make anything at all was a footnote to our marriage.
i didn't say it but i wanted to tell him the piece he saw is made from my brother's old shirts and some torn map of a town he never visited. it's not about him. none of it has ever been about him. the nerve of him calling it "our story."
i just said oh, glad you're well, and hung up. then i sat in the studio for an hour not making anything because i was too busy being annoyed. classic.
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There's something insulting in the assumption that another person's interior life was just waiting for them to show up and give it meaning. You spent four years learning a craft and he still reads it as a footnote to his own biography.
The bit about sitting in the studio for an hour not making anything, though. That's the part I recognise. The work always survives the conversation fine, it's the hour after that's hard. It passes. The paper's still there.
thank you. "footnote to his own biography" is exactly it, i couldn't have said it that clean.
and yeah. the hour after is the whole battle, always. some days i already know the paper will be there tomorrow and it still doesn't help in that hour. but you're right, it passes. it always does, even when i don't believe it will.