Polaroid...

I woke this morning with a tumor in the side of my head. It was a pinching feeling, and built. Enough so that as I pushed my pointer and middle fingers into its mass, it would shift and evade my pressure in a coordinated and collected movement. I had just changed my number to a 323 after two years and began to get this worried feeling about no one knowing my new number and that life had been good.

And then it subsided.

…

I’m living in a new apartment on Kings Road in West Hollywood. It’s a long one bedroom, like a giant shoebox. I’ve got a pool on the roof with a sauna, UG parking and a deck that’ll house a fire pit once I stop dropping 800’s to fix my car. I turned the living room into a theater with a grotesque & beautiful 100-inch screen. I have a bedroom with a desk where productions such as this occur. It’s nice. Maybe a bar eventually, another couch, an Audi, who knows. Everything is working to fall itself into place.

Then there’s this picture. I don’t know what to do with it. I carried a Polaroid that pranced with me as I pranced through the kingdoms of Europe…living proof of a fool mad with love. The fool was me. The polaroid was of a lady and I, wrapped up as I distanced and snapped camera with long arms and stretching fingers. I used it to mark the books I read and as a savior in moments of terrible loneliness, as a reminder of the possibilities that lie on far ends of a perilous journey. In every one of the countries and cities I traveled, to me that picture leapt.

So then…



I was walking La Rambla in Barcelona when I met Masa. I don’t know if it was a first or last name and it hardly mattered. For 80 Euros and over a span of three hours, he sketched the Polaroid onto a canvas. Once finished, he handed it off and stuttered a valve in my heart. With gold teeth leading his smile, he looked to me with an earnest grace and said softly, as if it were a secret, “She’s so beautiful, it drew itself.”

…

Sadly though not as tragically as these things can go, the lady, my Navigator and I have since turned to separate journeys. Still, the picture leans against the wall next to my front door. If I weren’t a culprit, if it were an arbitrary work of art, I’d hang it high and proclaim to guests, “True love, found not sought and frozen in time…but lost.”

I’d offer them a drink and pour myself a triple, then slip off to the bedroom. I’d phone the co-star and we’d have a laugh about our last days and my sneaking the picture out of her apartment as she slept. We’d laugh heavy about now, how I had to have it and know why but don’t, its destiny…to always leap, tucked from sight.