Suddenly I fall through the last two years.
What feels like both an eternity and the blink of an eye.
Everything and nothing changed in equal measure, the life I once knew beats a faded distant drum, drawing me back, pulling me in.
The first few days seemed like a dream, a joke, a bad April fools, but it didn’t end, it doesn’t end.
My work as an artist became seemingly unimportant to the world, and more important than ever to me. My studio inaccessible due to lockdown and local council rules, I rapidly took a technicolour coat of paint colours home, I looked at my tiny desk in the corner of my bedroom, only previously occupied by me and books, now a host to rainbows, matching the empathic rainbows inhabiting the windows of the streets we walked.
This limited space, this home, this intimate space now had to shuffle long and make room for work, for creation. But in these times, at the start of it all, it was my head which could not make room, not shuffle along, not adjust. I felt bereft, still grieving for my father who was lost just months before the world started losing. The news channel a constant battle ground, soldiers made from doctors and nurses, fighting against an invisible enemy, protective suits against natures biological arsenal.
And so, I cried, more than I had ever cried, the worlds loss felt like my loss, our loss. I wanted to escape, to be a child again, and so I dove down, into worlds and words of comfort, away from the realities, away into tales, old comfort blankets of fairy stories, mermaids, fairies, witches, sunshine and colour.
Soon the tears dripped onto paper, through paint and creation flowed again, sanity returned, and images emerged.
And, Once upon a time, I emerge as if from a dream, like the people sleeping in the castle from sleeping beauty, eyes blurred and mouth still covered. Am I still waiting for the handsome prince to save me, or have I learned how to save myself in and from my solitude?