“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
~Janet
Fitch, White Oleander
On November 2 around 6:36pm, I received
the most beautiful gift: a resurrected piece of art I thought I would never see
again.
But let me back up, sometime in the
early 1990s, my friend Sherrie Miller, who is a talented artist and my first “favorite
artist”, used to sketch pieces that would end up hanging in my bedroom. I wrote
poetry and had written a series of poems about Claudian the Atheist, an
imaginary character whom I had created based on my first “love of my life”’s
best friend’s “goth” name. His real name is Ben which is just another bit of
connection to my fella who also has a best friend with the same name. As a
little side note because I’m being tangential, before I realized that I even
had a choice of not having children, I believed that I would name my son
Claudian Dyvad. He would have hated me, I’m sure.
Anyway, my Claudian poems were about
the character’s various journeys to heaven and hell. His afterlife began when
Claudian’s Cessna crashed into a church to which he muttered, “God, what an
ending.” I cannot recall why or if I asked but Sherrie illustrated the story around
my poem. I still have the original. Later I asked Sherrie is she would do a
painting of the piece. I knew that it would be an artistic interpretation of
her original sketch and the two look quite different but it was terribly
significant since it was the first piece of art that I had ever commissioned
from an artist.
I realize that not giving a name to
my first “love of my life” is a bit annoying but I want to respect the
anonymity of it all and as I shared in a previous
post, I don’t want to come across as a creep considering that I’m Facebook
friends with his wife. My previous post actually leads to this one. I wrote, “For
years he called my mother to check in on me. I didn't know any of this until
2006 when we reconnected. My mother never said a thing.” I realize this reads a
bit like The Notebook by Nicholas
Sparks but the truth is he stopped calling my mother a few days before my first
wedding when my mother told him that I was getting married. My mother was not thrilled with me getting
married the first time and she told me that the night before my wedding. I
remember saying, “I can’t do anything about this now” when she announced that
both my father and she believed I was too young. How’s that for weird parenting
and timing. Everyone of that time period and many of my friends today know that
she could have called off the wedding by simply saying, “X called” or “X has
been calling.” But she’s a controller of secrets (a whole other story) and I
never knew any of this until he told me. When we parted from that reunion, I
called her and screamed at her. She muttered something about she thought it was
best. Let me be clear, I don’t think I would have ended up with my first fella.
We were too young and both had lots of living to do; we also appear to be happy
in our current relationships. But she took away my 22-yr-old self’s choice by not
disclosing the phone calls.
I could write that my first husband
was awful and in many ways he was. My current fella hates him based on the
stories. We were just young and without brains being fully grown, we both made
poor choices.
In 1996, he burned all of my letters
from my first “love of my life” and then set fire to this painting (and nearly
the apartment while I was screaming that he was merely burning them into my
soul). He was in a state of jealousy and believed that the character in the
painting resembled the image of my former love (and to be fair, it does).
Fast
forward twenty years and Sherrie randomly sends me a digital version of the
burned painting I thought I would never see again. I had no idea that she had
photographed her work. I opened the message and I became a puddle of tears. Seeing
this still makes me cry. I remember it burning; I remember the smell of
pictures and letters and paint burning. Letters I had read a hundred times
which had been kept so tidy and together with a velvet ribbon stored in a
precious box went up in flames.
This doesn’t change the past but it
certainly is nice to have a piece of that horrible event resurrect from the
flames.
Art from the talented Sherrie Miller.
