You’ve made all the changes in your life that you deemed necessary on the path toward Moving On. You’ve arranged for yourself a space that is yours. No one can enter this space for fear of electroshock. You’ve taken all the necessary precautions. You’ve put newspaper around your couch. You’ve wallpapered your house in leaves that you collect right at the point of tree departure. You waited under trees, sometimes for hours, to collect these leaves. They had to be falling. You’ve made an effigy and burned it and in the process singed off your eyebrows. You played it off like it was an aesthetic choice. You’ll use the word aesthetic more, you decide. You’ve realized that there is no brilliant a-ha moment, and that it’s more like listening to a-ha on YouTube repeat with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s by your side, watching Take On Me until it means nothing at all. You’ll collect all of the waste you make and pile it in a room instead of in the trash. You’ll tell yourself that you’re building a modern art installation, try to figure out how to get people to come to a mini gallery that’s just your house. You’ve seen things like this before in art documentaries, so it’s okay. The singed eyebrows will give you an air of artistic mystery. You’ll do things like pile all the baskets into a shopping cart and then fill the baskets with groceries and unload each basket on the conveyor belt, one after another, because you like the look and feel of the baskets in there, littles to a big. You’ve looked out there for a person who says and does even a modicum of these things, but you haven’t found them yet, so you make spider webs of aesthetic choices in the meantime. You collect gourds and turn them into instruments with which you can play vaguely Renaissance type songs in your house that has been emptied of everything except for what’s in the Waste Room, which has now become the Everything Room. You consider breaking down the rest of your house until it’s nothing but the ER and living in that space you made. You could use the refuse of the house to build a fourth wall, but you might just bring the refuse into the ER too. You pile on shirts and pants at the resale shop until you become a rolly ball of a person and then pull the tags out, one at a time, to pay for them. You decide you no longer need a closet. If you wear all of these things at once, it’s like you’re not feeling anything at all. The way that you paint is that you place a canvas beneath you and crane your neck and pretend like you’re filling in the blanks in the sky. The resultant drops become the painting and you sell it right away through a garage sale that’s really just an art sale on your lawn. You only sell the one, but you are not discouraged. You are fierce. You’ve been living post-him for nine months now. You’re now able to chart the breakup in babytime. You consider finding mothers who just delivered today so you can find birth in death, but you decide that this will be a difficult endeavour. You break open a bag of potatoes and line them up on your kitchen floor so that they can build sprouts and you can have a potato garden for all of time. You won’t break down the house anymore, but will instead cover its walls with your work. You will run into the rain and let it plaster your abundant clothes to your skin, making you a soggy multicolored marshmallow. Some nights you’ll let the rain weigh you down and you’ll collapse on your back with the clothes as bedding. Some nights you’ll run naked through the streets and jump and grab at streetlights so that their power can be yours. Some mornings you won’t want to get up, but some mornings you will get up despite this. You will spite all the things that need spiting. You will jump through the sprinklers. You will open the fire hydrants. You will trail paint behind you, spilling onto the ground, because you’re Moving On.
Liza Olson 