Reed & Kessler & The Wild Purvi Art Collective – November 2023

Timmy Reed, Kelsey Kessler, and the Wild Purvi Art Collective traded art and words. Kelsey shared this image, titled “Garden’s Tune”:

In response, Timmy wrote this poem:

I WAS A SALAD

I thought my brain was a salad and my face was made of clay and stuck in the expression it
had. Turned out it was a garden. I was living!
I needed to tell my friends.
They didn’t care as much as I did.
I told them ten times anyway.
Because sometimes you have to.

Why?

Why NOT?

Because you are human and how else were you going to meet this cool person if the limb you
crawled out on wasn’t at all fragile?
Don’t answer that.
Not now.
Leave me alone.
Don’t talk to me.
We need less answers for everything in life.
Even you.
Especially me.

* * * * *

Timmy shared this short story with the Wild Purvi Art Collective:

Holy Days and the Days That Surround Them

Anthony and I made plans to meet for drinks. I asked my mom how many cigarettes she smoked today and she got agitated with me. I told her I was just worrying about her because I loved her. She was putting out Christmas decorations, although she said we would not bother with a tree. I did not want to have Christmas at all this year. I told her and her face crumpled. She lit a smoke. Christmas makes people sad because it never lives up to our memories or expectations. I like the holidays nobody cares about, dumb ones like Arbor Day or Groundhog Day. I didn’t want to get into a fight with her and I could feel one coming so I went outside and walked around the block, smoking one of my own. It was warm enough outside that I didn’t have to button my jacket, but I knew it would get cold soon.

I thought about the seatbelt and Lila McKye’s suicide in order to get my mind off my mother’s own mortality. Sometimes I am drawn to conspiracy theories, even though I never believe in them. They at least attempt to explain things. I began to wonder if she hadn’t killed herself but had been strapped into the car with the pedal held down somehow. Apparently she had not even tried to brake, I heard on the group message I had been sent online. It seemed like something that happened in movies a lot, although I couldn’t think of any specific movie off the top of my head. I didn’t know how a person – a murderer, maybe a cabal of them – could fake a vehicular suicide like that but I was sure it must be possible. Just about anything could be possible.

I didn’t know why I was fixating on the stupid murder idea, except to let my mind wander away from itself. I also didn’t know why anyone would want to murder Lila McKye, mostly because I had not seen her in years and she was barely active on social media so I didn’t know much about her current situation. She never seemed like someone who would grow up to be a murder victim, but she didn’t seem like someone who would grow up to commit suicide either.

When I looked up her profile after hearing the news, it turned out we were listed as Friends even though I didn’t remember ever communicating with her on there. I didn’t remember unblocking her. She had only posted a few pictures on there that I remembered: a beach, a castle, a pair of red leather sandals, and a funny old-looking map showing the earth as a flat object like a playing board, ringed with vast oceans and frozen mountains. Other than that, there were only pictures from when she was a teenager and before – sports teams, class photos, pictures posing in groups at parties, a few snapshots of sculptures – which had all been posted by others, mourners mostly. The whole page was filled with people wishing Lila prayers and thoughts, prayers and thoughts. It always struck me as strange that we tell dead people we are thinking about them. Social media pages were the new gravesites. I got sick of scrolling through all those thoughts and prayers after a while. Thoughts and prayers only screamed at the invisible. In a town where it felt like everyone grew up knowing everyone else, everyone definitely knew Lila and they were reminding her now.

I did not know the reason Lila and I had lost touch. We had a brief but meaningful thing – more later – once in our twenties but then we both moved away and stopped talking. We ignored each other on social media. We didn’t talk. Was there a reason?

There was at first.
Why does anyone lose touch?
Usually no reason at all.
Or maybe it is just easier sometimes.
Hurts less.

Many people that I once called close friends, I just called friends now and I probably shouldn’t even have called them that. I thought I should just call them people I know or more accurately, people I once knew. I would end up seeing a number of these people in the coming months. Years too. The planet was smaller than I knew at the time.

The neighborhood my mother lived in was right inside the City/County line. It was quiet there and there were a lot of families and older people who used to have families, like my mother. The children came home from school and their parents waited outside, chit-chatting, to greet them. There were a lot of animals too: rats, mice, chipmunks, squirrels, cats, dogs, birds, and foxes. Sometimes, a lost deer. We were far enough north of the harbor that she rarely saw seagulls or ducks but my mom still talked about them. My mother liked most animals, but especially water birds, I think. She used to make up stories about how she was friends with a talking duck named Gertie when I was a kid. I had believed every one of them.

I did not grow up in this neighborhood. I grew up down the street in a house that now sat empty. Before he died when I was in graduate school, my father lived over the County line on the other end of town with his girlfriend, the woman he had been cheating on my mother with for years while they were married. They didn’t get divorced when I was a child, although my younger sisters – twins – and I probably wished they had. Divorce is a young person’s game. It gives you more time to heal and find a new existence. Many unhappy couples with children had the instinct to wait until their children were adults to split, but that was a mistake.

I worried about my mother living alone, dying alone, for instance, much more than I ever would have when I was a child and she was still young and working and healthy. Eligible, even.

Not that I did much to help my mother, or even come home to visit her. I always ended up frustrated or sad when I visited. I wasn’t a very good son as an adult and I didn’t remember being a great one as a child either.

I smoked two more cigarettes before going back inside her house.

In response, the Wild Purvi Art Collective created this piece titled “Retablo of Surrounding Days” (click on a photo to enlarge):