Leaking Out Fingertips

I want more time.  I want more space. 

And I know it makes me selfish because I’m praying to love to live with whatever I’m given, to not clutter up my life with so much I have to do, to clean, to store, to worry over.  But creation is where I connect with Creator.  And I want space to create.  Rooms to create.  Classes to teach me to create.  Time and materials and money and endless inspiration to create, so I can soak up this feeling of bliss and everything beautiful that transcends the whole wide world when I create.  With paper, with words and color and razor blades at home and with watered down glue, with smudgy ink and maybe chalk, fabric and stitching and vinyl and metal and brush and things that shouldn’t go together.  On canvases of canvas but also of furniture and paper, computer screen and living room walls and closets turned studios.  I want this creativity to splash all over and keep coming, faster and faster and beauty leaking out fingertips like blood pouring from wounds… and with the same urgency.  Life or death.  Create, or die.

I want more time.  I want more space.

I want not to fuss with meals and cleaning toilets and washing towels when there are blank canvases piled beneath my rough-shod work table.  When cans of paint are aging in the linen closet and the brown all around squawks awkwardly out of place to be covered and restored before the paint all dries up, before more years have passed.  When I gush beauty at dilapidated pallet wood and what it could become and crave the tactical splendor of rusted iron and antique fans and smeared ink like some people crave cigarettes or chocolate ice cream.  When I want to drink in light and let it move me like music, to wear dirty hair another day so as not to let the muse escape, and not, as the rest of them do, just try and live regular. 

There are days I resent the sleeping hours, my own eyelids too heavy to fight them, though they’d give me more time, more quiet time and space while others sleep.  Other, humans, who don’t need color and word-play and the drastic change of something like they need to breathe air, like I… this alien being who doesn’t do regular.  And I wonder what they (The Regulars) say about me, the scattered girl with no rhythm of my own, whose anti-routine looks like a splatter-paint schedule, an abstractly-painted life with no rhyme or reason but just a little of this and that and a restless need to transcend merely living by creating, who tries to squeeze every frail drop of substance out of the seconds that tick by, examining the light as it dances in olive-shaded toddler eyes while dutifully wiping his snot-nose… finding that kind of something in all the sticky, dusty nothingness of living.  Finding very God in the faded color of an old-fashioned suitcase. 

I am all wrong and all wind-blown.  And I know I must be sideways when ruffles on pillowcases and the texture of burlap speak tranquility of heart and home, when, inexplicably, raspy-voiced singers with foul-mouths can sing Christian love straight into me.  And every time I try to do normal, I end up distracted by a tender smudge of beauty I almost missed. 

I run water in the washing machine, then run fingers over neglected threading and dusty stitching machines, dreaming of what might have been, and all the while the water runs and the machine begins to lurch, empty by my distraction, my all-wonky priority of beauty-seeking winning over the supposed-to-care notion of grass stains and garment labels.

And can this desperate need be good for anything, or only troublesome?  Can I live well in a world of regular if I can’t seem to manage the gray drudgery of the way the hours are so predictable, so… daily?  First morning, then evening, again and again?  But even as they’re sure to come, more and more and more, hours upon hours and days upon days…

I want more time.  I want more space.