THE BOX BETWEEN
after Diego Rivera’s “Seated Girls”
I have never heard and felt
so much silence before
while looking at a painting.
The silence was overwhelming.
Almost unbearable.
I have never felt so on the outside
of something, so shut off
and cut off as I did
while standing before that painting.
I desperately wanted to know
what those girls were saying.
The longer I looked at the painting
the longer I had the unshakeable sense
that the box between and on the table
behind those girls
was the visual representation
of the conversation they were having
that I couldn’t hear.
The box was almost like a miniature
version of the painting itself
whose contents were
completely hidden from me.
The painting’s silence
just kept growing and growing
as I looked at it.
It was a silence comprised
of so much artifice.
I realized that I had boxes
like this one in my life.
Boxes that contained the things
that I and others weren’t saying.
Things that got covered over
by the things we were saying.
The things we wouldn’t and couldn’t
share, the things we were
too afraid to share, for fear
of being hurt more
and made more alone
than we thought we already were.
And then there were the boxes
we kept from ourselves
that we couldn’t open because
what was inside was
too unknowable, too unnamable to name.
They were the conversation
we were all longing to have with ourselves
but to have them meant
sitting in a silence we did not think
we could sit in, because
the silence might be too
inconceivably inconsolable.
And then I realized
there would always be boxes
we’d never get around to opening
and that was just the way it was
and would always be.
And that was fine. Just fine!
Like looking at a star in the night sky
and knowing we’d never visit it.
Or like thinking about a pearl
gleaming at the bottom of a vast ocean
that we’d never dive to find.
Or like looking at a painting
and realizing we'd never really know
what the artist meant
by putting the pigment
where he or she put it.
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