Ready err not,

we Retreat to some Heavens

It was an ordinary day, not notable enough to remember the date or even the day of the week. I sat in a moderately comfortable black office chair, equipped with arm-rests and an adjustable height bar that I would fiddle with frequently. The fluorescent lights sterilized the room, reflecting off of the white tiles speckled and splattered with hints of blue, reminiscent of morning coffee in a greek disposable cup. That combined with the blue light of the screen was a strain on the eyes, but at least I couldn’t possibly be tired. I sat at this desk in the little front office cubicle of the Children’s Mental Health Resource Center, a part-time first point of contact , filling out intake forms and uploading them into a system. It was monotonous work, although I would occasionally receive rather odd and explicit calls that I would proceed to laugh about with the sweet older women who worked in the office with me. Despite the monotony, the work did feel important regardless of how small of the role I played in the process, which in itself was fulfilling.

As the end of my shift was drawing near, my body began moving vigorously in anticipation. The taps of my feet, the back of my pencil beating on the desk echoed amongst the keyboard clacks of my coworkers. My eyes glanced at the clock, and back at my notebook, and back to the clock, each time hoping that another ten minutes had passed. My back was hunched completely over my sketchbook, shifting back and forth to catch the points of light between my shadow. I hear footsteps coming up behind me, followed by a sweet southern voice,

“Get up, you’ve been sitting for too long. You need to stand up and stretch or you’ll mess your back up like mine.”

My coworker was standing in the doorway. I was the youngest one in the office by many years, so I often felt like I was constantly being mothered from all sides. It was endearing, and these reminders to get up and move around were very necessary. I stood up and started stretching, eyes dancing around the room while engaging in small talk about what my after work plans were.

“I have a painting I have to start,” I had told her. “Probably just going to be in the studio all night.” As I say this, my eyes fixated on a rather large canvas stretched on a big plank of wood. I had not tried to move it, but certainly had thought about using it for a while. I kept forgetting to ask the others in the office if it was needed for something. I turned to the woman and asked,

“Is anyone using this?”

“No, not at all. It used to be used as a bulletin board, but we got a new one. We left it in here because it’s just too heavy for any of us to throw out.” She replied.

“Can I take it?”

“Of course! I am warning you though, it is very heavy.”

“I think I got it,” I arrogantly replied (famous last words).

Lugging that canvas to the bus station, dragging on the concrete as I attempt to walk it down the street, was an arduous task. It was indeed very heavy. It was wide enough to greatly impede my vision, and there was no way to achieve a comfortable grip. With my arms stretched fully outwards, elbows straining with fingers clenched around the board’s edges at an impossible angle, I was at a tremendous strain. I finally managed to drag it through the threshold of the apartment after heaving it up the rickety wooden stairs. I trudged through the kitchen as Ozzy, my roommates' French bulldog, ran around in circles barking in excitement. I plopped the heavy board onto the living room floor and put my hands on my hips as I stared at it for a while. My breathing was heavy and my forearms pulsed in a writhing exhaustion, but my eyes honed, pupils dilating in a revelatory trance.

Cold metallic grey clouds shadowed with russian blue spiral upwards towards purple skies. Ambiguous burnt sienna figures stalk an orange oxide wasteland, where the atmosphere blends together with the plane making each indistinguishable from the other. There is an odd sense of space, as if there is no ground nor distance. A wall of trees with lush greenery separate the foreground from the background; the trunks are at stylistic odds with their canopies. They sit atop a lush field of chartreuse grass that sways with no true sense of direction in uncertain winds. The horizon of the foreground curves to resemble the resting crevasse between a human neck and shoulder. Teal translucent tendrils extend outwards and back into the ground, decorated with magenta phalanges resembling some sort of otherworldly inverterbre. A bank of clay intersects an aggressive, yet somehow contained river. Stacks of currents overlay each other, led by a light layer of sea foam. Walking along the bank are two bipedal creatures with translucent romaine skin, exposing phthalo green innards that resemble a nervous system or the veins of a leaf. Extruded from their shoulders are thick, stalk-like heads of a deep seed hue. A single, exposed eyeball sits atop spotted, amaranth leaves that extend from their neck-stalk. They are joined at both at their highlighted hands, as well as a visceral intestinal tract that connects them through the back and their stomach like a meat lasso. It looks as though they feed each other through some symbiotic process.

Turbulent times in that home led to a hasty retreat. The large board was packed up and taken away, to be packed up and taken away, again and again throughout a series of precarious housing situations resulting in many moves. Because of this, the painting itself had to be liberated from its wooden structure. It was simply too difficult to drag around in that form, and because of its weight and size, it was almost impossible to carry it without it hitting the ground and fraying the edges. I cut it off the board and rolled it up like a scroll, hoping that the paint wouldn't become brittle and flake off, or get torn by some other object amongst my messes of obscure and unnecessarily sharp possessions. Somewhere in this timeline of nomadic city living and service industry fueled binge drinking, this painting managed to escape me. It’s possible that I was able to sell it at some point (wishful thinking), but years of frequent black outs following undergrad render my memory unreliable. I sometimes like to think that it was accidentally discarded, and found by a passerby who took it home and cared for it. I’d like to think that they are actively trying to decipher or add to the lore that I was trying to build.

Tariye George is a designer and painter living in Richmond, VA. He is currently dragging himself out of the hell of his own creation, becoming one with his technology to do so.