swallow my tears

I've been pretty much finished with the drawing part of this series for the last month and focusing now on creating the frames, which I'm fabricating out of re-claimed spruce framing lumber from my carpentry jobs. I've been covering the wood with cancelled checks, glueing them down, sanding them to create a "worn" look, then polyurethaning them giving them that decoupage look. I've been working from this huge pile of cancelled checks, that my sister gave me five years or so ago, and only now, being about one third of the way through this project, have I finally run out of these checks. This got me to thinking about finding something else to use that could carry the same conceptual weight as cancelled checks. I thought of a box of old love letters that I had, maybe they would somehow work, in an interesting way, in relation to the prison record forms that I've been drawing on? These letters were from a former girlfriend of mine going back 25 years. As I began to re-read them I started to experience a flood of memory, emotion and melancholy. I've been happily married for 21 years, and still am, yet somehow these letters tore into my psyche.

I've been struggling with all of the implications of this new exploration for several weeks, trying to get feedback from friends and family (the latter not being the best source to expect open discussion from!) and probably the most interesting thoughts have come from my old college friend Robert, who is just now between jobs. We weren't talking about this issue of mine, just the dynamics of his job change. He observed the strange phenomenon of feeling a sadness at leaving his old job even though he might have hated it. He went on further to speculate that even a prisoner might even feel this kind of sadness upon gaining his freedom.

That got me thinking about how I had reacted to these letters, not that I had any hate for this former girlfriend, but I guess it's just the perspective one has once one is no longer in a situation, one can see things differently. And for me it's been a pretty powerful, cathartic experience to contemplate the changes that I have experienced in my life.