It Prevails

by: Ayesha Shelar

It prevails.

I couldn’t do the assignment I was given. Something about a fire across town, two people injured, no one dead. There was clearly nothing else of importance in that week, as when I went to investigate the bakery that the fire erupted from, it looked near pristine, a pink cupcake with what was supposed to be a burnt center. But the wall tiles were replaced, the display shelves were full, the rolling pins were dusted. The new grout was stark in comparison to the old photos from my research. Those workers with their hands, burnt and unusable, were at an address I couldn’t bother to locate. The story was already over, there was no thought left to spare for it. It used to feel like people moved faster in the city, but it feels as though the city has always been running ahead.

The assignments are nothing more than glorified titles again. No one would pay $2.50 to peruse an article where an author talks about the so-called “flagrant” vandalism that was covered up in a haste and hurry. Everyone knows how dismantled the government is nowadays anyways, do we have to make such a fuss about a person speaking the obvious? The girl who spills her coffee all over the breakroom countertop without fail every day was assigned the “picturesque extravaganza” of the wedding between the local wealthy guy and his third wife. The photographs she’s working with are filled with greenery and smiling faces, a montage of those storied folk who deserve what they take. She tells me that the speeches were so flowery and rich, and how the setting elevated itself above the trends. She hopes to find someone capable of providing like that soon. I joke and say the man is taking applications for his fourth wife. We laugh and leave the coffee on the breakroom counter to stain. The quartz is expensive and deserves to be a little ruined, when everything else in the office is. A watermarked ceiling, a carpet with threads pulling loose, and squeaky chairs may be part of the reason why nothing palatable for the masses are being written in this paper anymore. The last page of the newspaper will mention an unimportant affair that was wiped up cleanly, if you listen to what the police said.

Someone mentioned a movie that came out recently to mass appeal and wide disdain. Nothing is balanced in its favor anymore. The arts and culture department were having a field day with headlines and went around the cubicles asking for public opinion as if they’d incorporate them. I hadn’t watched the movie, I hadn’t watched a movie in a couple years. I can’t work without silence, I can’t think clearly if things cloud my brain. Anyways, I always hear the names of albums and movies, the cultural landmarks of the year or the decade, fade into a slow decline and I find it interesting that anyone seems inclined to engage in the first place. If everything moves fast, why would one want to slow down to enjoy it?

The editor was mentioning how we need to make the news a more accessible medium to explore, but it doesn’t seem that really is the goal of the owner. We could make the newspaper cheaper if need be. The paywall is impossible to get around on any normal computer. I don’t voice any of my thoughts, I wouldn’t check the news either if journalism hadn’t forced me into this place. If I truly cared about the world and addressing its larger faults, wouldn’t I be on the ground in a tumultuous country, interviewing those lain in sorrow? To stop being surrounded by the noise, they would have to live in deep Appalachia, no contact with anyone forever. The world we live in makes us guilty for everything, it seems like. Is it heartless to say that I wish that I had every right to forfeit my heart? To suppress its annoying beat under layers of gauze, not to heal it, but to muffle it out of my existence.

I wasn’t that late to work, but I had a reputation to uphold. That reputation seemed insignificant when I tripped on the staircase and watched my phone steadily make its way down the steps. The damage was insignificant, one thin white line snaking through the bottom. My chin was slightly bruised and swollen and made me look disproportionate for 3 days, but I couldn’t bring myself to cry. There seems like there’s no point in doing any performance if there is no gifted pity. I slept at 6 P.M. that night, my dreams of a lawncare company shutting down for reasons beyond perfectly tailored lawns. I woke up more tired than before and realized I had to finish my assignment. Sometimes, it feels like I walk backwards.

A boy who works in the art and culture department is sick. I know he’s lying but I can’t prove it. Mediocrity is the one word I can describe his writing with anyways, so maybe I should be glad that I was chosen to replace him. But it feels insulting. I overheard him once say his heart “was tethered” to every artwork he’d ever seen, and would forever remain that way. Anyone’s capacities could be used for better. The editor of the department places the offer in my hand with a “everyone is swamped” and “we believe you can create an appropriate replacement for his work.” I know it’s only because my original assignment was so minuscule compared to the large art gallery that to have no one cover it would be… stupid. The art gallery was an annual exhibition, showcasing what were “most defining” artworks against the background of a blank slate city. I hadn’t been in a museum in ages, and I certainly hadn’t yearned to go to one. The past was past, as they say, and dwelling on it is like letting blood drain, as they say again. And I know history is doomed and doomed further to repeat previous mistakes, but people echo that sentiment as if their choice made any difference in the grand scheme of this broken society.

So with no protest, I make my way towards the white box, having no idea what to expect. There were many years prior where I may have been eager, perhaps ecstatic to cut myself vulnerable through expression. I can understand how art would do that to you, laying bare for a white canvas until something fleshy and raw overtakes it. Those years are so far behind however, it feels more like a shadow of a memory.

I have a press pass in my hand, an officialness in my posture that remains rigid as I wait in the lobby. Everyone else is in a variety of styles and colors- casual to suits- and my neutral business pants and shirt seem far out of place. I don’t venture out of my way to talk to anyone as of yet, there’s nothing for them to comment on, but standing there waiting, blending into the blankness surrounding me feels torturous all of a sudden. This job that had required  me to be a camera, capturing the scene and not the emotion behind it, should’ve made me flat. Flatness allows you to sneak into all the crevices and corners that seem impenetrable. I was taught that when you are nothing enough to leave no impression, people naturally bare to you. You become the white canvas. I found my role comforting, waiting for layers thrust upon me, never forming my own. I guess dimension still yearns to form though.

When the gallery finally opened, people rushed with the frenzy of pretend poise. I readied my questions for artists and viewers alike, and was prepared for a bored evening of puffery. I took glances at the work, as the lines of the museum forced my eyes to draw towards them, but nothing seemed spectacular. Nothing worth leaving a wall empty for. I took note of it either way and asked a lone man in a suit how it made him feel. Empty. A woman in high heels and a flowy skirt. A twisted dread. What looked like a teenager in painted jeans. An impending sense of doom coupled with an introspective look into how death looms over life. Words so filled with syllables and lacking such meaning.

This affair continued for far too long, and people slowly trickled out until there was only about 30 minutes left. I sat for a second thinking about the dinner I was to have when I went home, and felt suddenly guilty for being so far removed from my responsibility. It makes me sick. Why should I care? This art gallery comes once a year, filled with rotating artworks that are overpriced and are always not worth the interpretation. The world slowly turns for a year, and the people within it create art that has no audience and no meaning beyond being a doodle or an extended collection. Those artists die with a dream of being recognized, yet ordinary people would never sit to appreciate them. And why would they? Why would they take something so important as mental capacity and use it to decoding other people’s emotions and actions? Why would they look at something and decide, simply because it existed and effort was put upon it, it mattered and was worth enough to stay existing? Would my teachers, my mother, my own self consider my artwork as a form that mattered enough to be hung and pampered on a white stage? A degree worth nothing, a life worth nothing, a caricature, an archetype, the starving artist, the tortured soul, the chopped ear, the mental asylum, the farther ghosts. I open my eyes and see my notes before me. Useless words that would’ve meant so much to a girl years ago. Words for a picture that has been gone for so long yet etched in her brain like the first writing carved itself into stone.  I cannot write when it isn’t silent.

I open my eyes and I see it. And there is nothing to describe. It looks like pure flesh, a beating heart on a canvas, ink and color pumping through the veins like it takes arduous labor just to keep it there. The eyes of it stare back at me, its lashes made of the fallen angel wings that show grace or descent into evil and I cannot tell which. Its mouth is whispering screams in my ear and my hands start to shake. I am forgetting my own voice, it says. Speak into me. Speak through me. Speak at all. Its incorrigible encouragement feels like it’s ripping into me, gripping my face but latching deeper. Its hands start enveloping me, its warmth feeling more like a fire, a flame caught in my chest. And it all feels so magnetic, like there’s something pulling me towards it closer and closer. And I let myself walk slowly, my legs stumbling, and I feel embarrassed. I feel so much that it disgusts me. My head burns and fingertips are turning black, and it’s like the ash of what was once my hands are now my instrument, my paint. As I get closer and closer, everything slowly falls into itself and the white wall explodes with colors and a saturation that feels unnatural. I almost reach out, I almost feel salvation, I almost feel reality and touch. But it pulls me away at the very last second and it should feel like nothing again. I should be my old self again. But I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want anything I have anymore. If I start anew, would every inch of me slowly be painted a new color, would my flat gain a dimension incomprehensible and impossible for anyone to fully interpret? I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I’m supposed to know the answers, supposed to have them stored in my brain objectively— a delicious meal on a plain cotton tablecloth. But now I am splattered and stained and I don’t want to launder and bleach myself clean. I like the dirt and the rot that sits on me, that has sat in me for years, being fed on by nothing until the growing seeds of my past life finally awoke.

I don’t feel free. I feel latched onto something freeing though. A tether forcing me to float above what I once was. I can’t see anymore and I don’t want to, I only feel the tap of someone’s fingers on my shoulder and a gentle lead out of the gallery. Where am I? I touch my face and I feel a cold tear. Old. It seems the world is moving faster than me again, but I let it, I want it all to overtake me and fill me and give me inspiration again. I want to fill myself again with everything I’ve lost.

I couldn’t do the assignment I was given. I gave the notes to the boy who was sick. He had a tan from the sun and I felt proud that I was able to catch his lie. He looked at my notes and laughed at the fake-deep bullet points and teased me for not prodding farther into the interviewees’ words. I tell him if it was already shallow, what else is there to search for? He looks at me silly and almost lets me have the win. I deserve it considering I did his work for him. But then he looks at me, something I was too scared to reach for in his eye, and tells me that is when I have to dig.

When I go home, I stare at myself too long in the mirror. And I follow his instructions.