Spotlighting

     Kayleb Candrilli

 

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Falling in love with the artist is hard on the eyes. The first skirt I see the artist wear is long and thin and when she floats above me the sun streams through, nearly uninterrupted, thin tulle. After that moment, it will become difficult to separate her from the sun. They are one in the same and I am in love with summer.

 

The artist is easy to fall into; imagine a roll top desk, or a treasure chest. The artist opens her head in a way that’s something antique and I’ve never seen a thing like it, the way it teems, the way it is thoroughly disorganized. In there, when I really look, I see colors I don’t have names for. They are only real in the artist’s head, real when I put my head inside of her head—little Russian dolls.

 

When I’m with the artist I say things like, I think where I grew up is inside of me. The mud is in my lungs or maybe liver, somewhere elemental.  She understands this perfectly and needs no clarification. She writes the things I say down in a notebook and I can’t believe she leaves room for me.

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*

I am frugal. I am frugal and have poor eyesight. Contact lenses are an uncomfortable expense. I can make two week pairs stretch for three, four, five months. I don’t take them out at night because what if there is an intruder and I wake up and spend crucial seconds searching for glasses that, depending on the aggressiveness of the intruder, will be knocked off my face anyway? I save money on contact solution this way, too.

 

Because I am frugal, my eyes attack themselves. There is a war beneath my lens. Now, in the dark, my left eye refuses. My pupil swells to the part of my vision that I’ve lost, just dark clouds.

 

*

The artist draws eyes that look like pinwheels, blood oranges cut through the middle. She draws my eyes like this; they spin and open into something else entirely, no dark clouds. This is how she compliments me.

 

I take off all my clothes and spread my body over the crocheted blankets that other naked bodies have spread over. In the artist’s art building, in the figure drawing room, I am her nude model. I agree to this because she has told me often enough that my body is art. It is the dead of night because I am shy and only for her. She angles the overhead lights, some at me, some along me. I am a bright mess of shadows. She tells me I cannot move and for her I stop breathing; she takes it all in because I let her. Outside, a storm, the wind rattles the single pane glass. I tell her she looks like a god. She tells me it’s because the light is in my eyes. She tells me not to move.

 

*

Before I saw Pabst Blue Ribbon at college parties, before empties were a place to ash spliffs, there were Pabst cans crushed in with hay in the beds of pick up trucks. These memories are best described by the way Cabelas’ Jackets make a chaffing noise when arms swing, the way beer breath is loud and fast, the way bolt actions sound like punch lines.

 

Country bumpers are a bit bent from drunk drives, nudges into hay bales, bales that never got picked up, ones that have sprouted new plants, permanent fixtures.

 

There is an agreement out in the fields when spotlighting and the agreement is this: The deer doesn’t know I’m there until it sees the light. I’m the thing that lives behind the sun, I’m the most powerful thing, the most beautiful thing it has never seen.