The Double-Sided Muse

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There are entities I wish to hold onto. I keep a legion of recorded memories I flip through my mind. I select one, magnifying it. I place the glowing portrait on my easel, and I get to work.

I have a mind prone to fantasies. I blame it on being an only child. Most times this proves to be debilitating, however, I have gotten vastly more present. I consider myself in the throws of real life now. Though my head, my head full of dreams, still desires to extend upon my reality.

“The first feminist gesture is to say: '“Ok, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.” - Agnes Varda

I read this quote years ago and I’ve thought about it constantly since. Part of the reason I was so trapped in my fantasies was because I felt I couldn’t throw them back onto the world. The world’s gaze was so strong I was struck into stillness by it. Or really, what I mean to say is, what I thought was the world’s gaze. I was really just watching myself outside of myself. Surveilling my each and every movement. Instead of just experiencing. I was half in my body and half outside of it. Especially in dating. Most often in dating, actually. I might not have been in my body at all. I was always watching us from a distance.

Though since reading that quote, I have done a lot of the work required to being firmly present and in my body. Feeling authority in my own sight. I now look out at the world and no longer think first of what it thinks of me. Or what I should be to fit inside of it. I experience sight from within my perspective.

The world inflicted on me the idea that I was the one to be consumed. That in love, it was a woman who should strive to become a muse. I thought it was an esteemed position to to find yourself in. A gift of being chosen. Quite frankly, I do think it’s beautiful. Being someone’s fuel for inspiration is a gorgeous miracle. But the idea of just being a muse felt flat, stagnant. I would posture myself but would grow uncomfortable. I just couldn’t watch them throw stories onto me. I had so many stories I too was experiencing and wanted to tell.

I no longer just want to be the one who serves as inspiration. Now that I am seeing, I am feeling, I am gathering my own inspiration I would like to use.

Let us imagine — if I was to lay on the floor as you painted me, your hands flicking paint with the brush and your face turning a certain degree, what would I do with this sight I see? My hands still, yet movement and feeling erupting inside of me. Where would I put these worlds I saw, while I watched you paint a world out of me?

I desire a double-sided muse.

Where he throws me the paintbrush and I use myself as the canvas. Painting everything he makes me feel atop my skin.

Where there is a sickness, there is also a beauty. I have found that this fantasy-prone brain of mine has become profoundly helpful in my artistic life. As long as I put a use to these fantasies, if I make them something physical, something tangible, their meaning rises and they exit from my body. I am no longer trapped by them. All of this time, it might have been my art disguised as my fantasies knocking in my head for me to open their door.

I started writing about these instances, these small moments I would collect, watching the men I adored or hated or hated to adore. Crafting stories, fantastical allegories, and giving homes to the things once left in my mind to rot.

What's good is that as a writer, as an artist, you can keep things alive that might have been left for dead. You can give them a proper rest or another chance to keep living on.

That moment that passed between us that maybe you threw away instantly, lives in me revolving. I take out that spinning world and let it unleash on the page. I make something mean the way it was supposed to mean. The way it felt. That nano-second of infinity that lives, when I struck my fingers in your hair, or when you smiled and it pulled a smile out of me, those moments can exist outside of myself and keep living. I can share them with more than just myself. Because I think they deserve to. Their life in me might have an expiry date but I believe there is something of infinitesimal magic that should be tapped into and stored. It might just be that I have a glimmering eye, the world shocks and startles me with its beauty. The same beauty I find runs through you. I collect each world you give me and place it on a set of lines. I have uranus, neptune, mercury, venus, jupiter, and more that you have never even heard of.

You give me feeling and for that I am able to make art out of it.

A friend told me the other day, “I think men are your muse”

I think she’s right.

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