The Rhythm Ran Out
So I went downstairs
Last week just… happened.
I took a break from all creation that I had not planned on taking. It wasn’t rest that I chose in advance and felt clear about.
In fact, last week happened despite my wanting to press pause and just cry.
School costs me twenty to thirty hours a week.
I work part-time, another twenty-five to thirty on top of that.
Most weeks I manage it…
I have a rhythm, and I show up to it the way I show up to everything else: one thing at a time, not looking at the full shape of it at once.
Last Monday, the rhythm ran out before the week did.
I was in a PMDD dark cloud, and doing my best to study for exams. That’s the whole story.
I went downstairs.
Not to paint — I knew I didn’t have the hours a session would ask for, my palette was frozen, and I’ve learned that starting something I don’t know how to finish is its own kind of cost.
But I went, and I looked at one of the canvases I’ve been working on…
It’s the first thing I started working on when I got paints back into my arsenal. First thing I broke the cold spell with.
Fussy, my asshole cat, scratched the canvas at some point. I’ve been working to fix that, too.
…I’m not exactly sure what it needs.
Not sure what I need.
So it stays somewhere between paused and abandoned — and I’m not ready to decide which.
I picked it up, carried it carefully upstairs, and brought it to my office, the room I spend the most time in.
Not to work on it.
Just to have it near.
When I’m not sure about a direction I want to go with a painting, I will spend literal days of stolen minutes, here and there, over weeks and months, staring at it. Sometimes this can last for years.
And I seldom show paintings when they’re missing something.
A painting that’s progressing cleanly, sure. Beginning layers deserve their honest time in the spotlight, too.
But a painting that’s missing something? It feels too vulnerable. Like I tried but couldn’t finish or succeed. Like, my abilities aren’t enough yet.
I’ve been thinking about what that painting is missing.
It’s not productive, but not exactly avoidance either.
Something closer to: I wanted the practice in the room with me, even when I couldn’t do the full practice.
It’s part of the game. Part of the work.
The week I didn’t post, I brought the unfinished thing closer instead of further away.
I don’t have a clean interpretation for that.
But it doesn’t feel like nothing.
The break didn’t stop the making.
It just changed what making looked like that week.