As I Am

“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” 
― Frida Kahlo

I draw what it feels like to move in my hips. Each swing, a valley and mountain and river. I am an entire landscape of emotion. Each inch of my skin begs for attention. And I give it attention as I sweep ink across a page. When I breathe in, an oceanfull of sky slips into my lungs. I know the sound of my footsteps, on different days, as I carry myself in different ways. I can feel the smiles that play across my face. Each a different version of a river. Something flowing through the universe of joy. 

I have spent enough time with myself to know that my face gives away each thought as it passes through me. I am living emotion. A flux of feeling and expression. Some might say artist, I say art. My shoulders carry stories of lovers whose arms once draped around me. The memories dance through my soul into images of stars and moon and longing. I have learned how to hold myself with words and art and song as my worlds slip from one into the next. As my reality shifts, and I somehow remain the same. 

I love the person I am becoming. The body that I inhabit reveals hundreds of layers of me that I may never quite know all of and yet I already know all of. There is peace in the mystery. An intangible excitement for this world that lays undiscovered, just under the tip of my toes. And as I dig down into the multitude of me, I find love for everyone else. The journey each person must take into themselves. To find themselves whole, somewhere. 

I know the shape of me is fluid. I change and yet somehow remain the same. Me, a subject. Me, a woman. Me, a human being somehow separate, and somehow... connected to every thing on this planet. And so I spend time with myself to learn everything else. To discover what mystery the universe has placed within me for the world. I ask questions, and dance, and trust, and jump, and fall, and exist as I am as I am.

Some call me an artist, I call me Art.