Two

He once stood too close to a Rothko

There were no paintings in the house. No fridge magnets of Tuscan hills, no calendars with cute cats, no children’s drawings (he once tore one in half by reflex; it was a sun with legs, it unsettled him).

It’s not phobia, it’s a, a… a parasitic perception of, of the optic nerve, perhaps. The paintings, they don’t hang on walls, they hang on me, the paintings, they hang on me, I’m the nail!

When he passes a painting (accidental, gallery, dentist office, lobby of the wrong building), it slips a whole life into his bones without asking. Assigning him a broken family. A memory of a woman wearing a yellow scarf who sends him postcards from a memory that isn’t his, that isn’t hers, that isn’t theirs. He misses her terribly. But the paintings don’t.

Paintings remember better than you do. Paintings don’t care about what’s True. Paintings care about what’s Felt. He calls them liars with good teeth.

Last night, on September 28th, he dreamt he was hung. Framed. Labeled wrong.

UNKNOWN ARTIST (c. 1995 – ?)
Oil on canvas.

How does it Feel?

Visitors passed by like nothing had teeth. Like time didn’t itch. No pupils dilated. No ghosts invited. Just clackheels + lifeless brochures breathing + that faint museum-smell of hand sanitizer and repressed memories.

The silence was curated. Framed in invisible glass. Hung like deliciously raw guilt. But it throbbed. It itched. GRRRRWAHH!, it pressed against his eardrums like an unspoken confession. A maybe-melody of a frequency only shame hears, perhaps lower than E minor.

He loved it, or he didn’t, or he loved that he didn’t know the difference.

Some noises don’t come from mouths. Some songs are swallowed backwards. This silence was exactly that; it crawled into his jaw and vibrated. He tried humming along. The guard stared. He smiled. He never smiles.

Apologies, I’m just tuning in, it’s a, a… a parasitic perception of, of the cochlear nerve

The eye pretends it’s not an ear, but a painting heard wrong can spit your throbbing existence to the ground in an instant. Sometimes – rarely – Mr. Lovevoid allows himself a glance (some sort of self-punishment). One half-second. A retinal flicker. Just enough.

His pupil records it. It develops in the darkroom of his gut. He doesn’t sleep on those nights.

He once stood too close to a Rothko and felt a nosebleed coming from the soul not the sinuses. He listened, closely and intently, but the deafening sound swallowed before it could speak.

Wrapped in fear, he called a helpline and said:

There’s a canvas in my hallway. It wasn’t there before.
Sir, is it threatening you?
Yes, it’s remembering me too loudly.

[DR. H–’s NOTE: Mr. Lovevoid denies authorship of this memory. I have preserved it for clinical purposes.]

No one knows where the fear began. But therapists do (therapists always do). Maybe a glance. But a glance is a wound, and a wound can be stretched, and hung, and titled UNKNOWN ARTIST (c. 1995 – ?).