[ Updated, as I think I might be almost finished with this piece at last.][Another update: I wasn’t yet, but I’m closer now….]

Te Amo is Spanish for “I love you.” My partner, Sid, used to sign his letters to me with that. Before the shitty state of U.S. healthcare killed him.

I’ve been working on this piece, in my mind, for 7 years. I’m still working on it. Sometimes, I imagine it depicting a person with a body that’s half a bombed-out building. Rusty rebar and severed wiring and broken pipes all hanging out over a war torn landscape, bits of paper and drywall and wood, fluttering down. Sometimes, it’s a self portrait, walking on the yellow sand of a deserted Mexican beach, in a black gown that looks like the dead vines of a winter garden. This time, it just came out like this.

In all its guises, it’s an attempt to portray the archetypal sense of what it means to be in mourning. It’s all a flowering from the days right after Sid, when I ran off to Mexico with nothing but my dog and my delusions, trying to breathe when I couldn’t, trying to find water to fill an unquenchable thirst, dying of it, right next to the ocean.

This piece is, I dunno, something like 4′ x 5’… I dunno. I’ll measure it later. Still working on it.

[Edit: After some more work, see https://beyondthebarbs.wordpress.com/2020/10/12/dying-of-thirst-while-drowning/.]