Sorry and goodbye
by Sinnae Choi
When I was 36, I fell in love for the first time. It was a sticky, malfunctioning love, but it was mine and I loved being in love, so I held on for a long time. He was sometimes kind, often distant. I held tightly and squeezed, hoping I could wring a drop of blood from him. I studied every part of his body, wondering if there was a hidden ingress behind his ear or in the dunes of his chest. A latch that I could pull to let me in, which I never found.
Eventually, there was only bitterness remaining, so I left. I left abruptly and never spoke to him again.
A month later, I was accepted into a Master of Fine Arts program. I was to go live in a desert, far from home, and learn how to speak again. I had been dormant for fifteen years, living a pale-bellied routine of penance, away from all the things I had carelessly disfigured as a child. My lover and my love for him were all I’d had for a long time, but now I had something else: a recollection of joy, a return to ardor. I’d forgotten that I had once lived in opulence, amid vast tracts of glitter and shrouded in the velvet of gouache. I was profoundly infatuated, again, with material and sensation. For the first four months I did nothing but paint.
At first, I painted with salt. Crystals left behind from evaporation warped the paper and crept up the dams I had built at the borders of the page. They scabbed between green-and-gold pools of pigment and metal; the surface became terrain. I was able to grow very small and disappear into these tiny couloirs, searching for caverns and riverbeds and whatever else may have formed there. In this way I let go of fear.
Next, I painted with white, all sorts. I learned what it meant to be invisible, by adding and erasing white. White was the language and paint was the utterance: zinc was sheer as a veil; titanium colluded with bare paper. I meticulously covered specks of dust and streaks of colored paint in white, an attempt at a return to flawlessness. In this way I let go of hastiness.
Then, I began making small paintings out of transparent plastic skins, recreating blown glass membranes and the moiré illusion of silk textile. The obverse became the reverse, and concealed structures made themselves known. In this way I let go of shame.
With every painting, I became lighter. I practiced pleasure and excised pain, and for some time, I circumvented heartache.
I think I was happy.
There was an unmissable feeling that I carried with me daily, though. In the resting moments between my projects and my classes and the monsoons and the noise, I felt the hollowness of missing him and hating him. I’d hoped he would fade neatly, but he didn’t. This feeling crept past the threshold of my newly-built happiness and threatened to bring down its walls. I swallowed the attrition and continued working.
It was one morning in October that I became aware of something: I was beginning to forget him. It had been four months since I had seen him last. I still thought of him regularly and my stomach would drop each time, but his outline had become indistinct. I knew his cologne had a particular smell, but I could no longer recall it. He had told me a funny joke one night but…what was it? He was slipping away.
Caught between relief and panic, I chose to exorcise what remained of him with finality in a series of twenty small paintings. I would take only these twenty keepsakes with me, and leave behind my perpetual grief. In my darkened studio, I dipped black ink on my fingertips and tried to recreate the memory of touching his body, moving methodically between now-hazy landmarks, one per paper. Here was the crook of his knee where I’d once dug my fingers, and here was the shape of my hands clasped around his waist.
Paper of course does not yield, nor does it reciprocate, and so it was an exercise in futility. The ink ran uncontrolled across the paper while I attempted to dam the flow with resists and paints. My fingerprints, initially crisp against white, were lost in the wetness almost immediately.
After the ink dried, I embellished the places where my fingers had first touched using holographic foil. Ringed spots of hot pink plastic as proof of all the times, before and now, that I had tried—bright and loud as declaration of love, iridescent for my hope, ragged and imperfect in my failure.
In this way, I let go of him.
In early winter of that year, along with my other paintings about colors and light and crystals and words, I exhibited these works. Although embarrassed by their maudlin and biographical nature, and worried I was revealing too much of myself, I loved them. I was grateful to have loved, and I loved telling it to the world.
These paintings are a snapshot of the memory of a man, taken in the last moments before forgetting him. They are a record of the mending of a disheveled heart.
Half a year after the last time we spoke, the pain lifted and I could breathe again.
I’m sorry. Thank you for everything. Goodbye, and I hope you take care.
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Sinnae Choi (BFA RISD 2011) is a New York City-born interdisciplinary artist currently working out of Las Cruces, NM. She has a background in glass sculpture, and her most recent body of work is comprised of tools and talismans made in porcelain, cameo, polymer and fine metals. Her work is concerned with material joy, optics in transparency, formal explorations into the structural elements of painting and sculpture, and the creation of miniature worlds.