You know I love you so

I’ve been drawing a lot. It’s the one activity calling to me above all others. I’ve gotten into using fountain pens and experimenting with different colored inks. It started when I began using fountain pen ink in empty Pentel Brush Pen cartridges that I learned to hack from a tutorial. When I get into something, I go monotropic. I had the ink, got a few fountain pens, and here I am with a drawing habit.

As I was drawing, I realized I had the primary colors, red, blue, … a few secondary colors, but no yellow. I’d been using a marker or a highlighter when I needed that. And I felt a need to have a yellow.

I went and ordered a Diamine yellow ink and when it came the next day (Saturday) I loaded it into a Pentel Brush Pen and used it in a few pieces. I realized I wanted it because I needed light.

I’ve needed light lately. I’ve been in the dark.

And I was drawn to yellow, drawn to draw in yellow.

And I woke up this morning shaking myself awake from a dream. Shaking myself awake because I realized it was a dream and I couldn’t take it.

I’m sitting in the waiting room at WestMed on Theall Road in Rye where we took Dad for his radiation treatments. Mom is walking toward me from the examining rooms in the back and she is wearing a bright yellow shirt that she always looks so pleasant in and her hair is her vibrant red and she has a calm, collected, confident look about her… she disappears behind a divider and I panic because I realize that I’m dreaming and I don’t know if I can handle this, if I can handle seeing her and I panic and shake, and she comes toward me again and I wake up for real and I’m shaking and crying and I remember the vivid yellow shirt.

So I’m sitting downstairs in my office and my desktop wallpaper is set to rotate at intervals and I glance left and the current image is from a sketch I made in April of 2023 from a balcony at the Beacon Theater in NYC waiting for Bono to start his one-man show from his memoir Stories of Surrender. I remember being drawn to the yellow motif over the black and white. Willie Williams’s stage design really emphasizes it and I love it.

And I’m remembering the show… there was a song Bono sang… “I Will Follow” was about the loss of his mother, Iris… he sang “Iris (Hold Me Close)”… Iris standing in the hall/she tells me I can do it all…. and then the show closes after the loss of his Da…

Mom encouraged me to go. She knew how hard it was for me to go to Manhattan, to deal with traffic, crowds, etc. My neurodivergence was undiagnosed at the time but my sensory difficulties were always there. Mom seemed to intuitively understand them better than anyone, probably because I inherited her nervous system. But I also inherited her heart. And she knew how much I’d love to see Bono up close at the Beacon like that. You guys don’t have kids, you don’t go on vacations, enjoy it and treat yourselves.
She took such vicarious joy in experiences that made us happy.

I snap back into tonight at the computer and that picture with the yellow.

And I can’t help but hear Coldplay and as trite as it is I’m hearing

Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you
And everything you do
Yeah, they were all yellow

And my eyes are filling with tears

Because I need light right now. I need the stars to shine for me… hell, I’m buying yellow to shed light onto a dark page…

Because the parallax is closing. The Venn diagram between who I want to be and who I think I am is finally becoming a perfect circle. I say becoming. Some days it is easier to hold those circles together, to keep them integrated, than other days.

I’m writing about my Mother a lot lately. This is still not real. And then it hits me with how real it is.
But she gave me a gift. It was a gift 49 years in the making. It was a gift given every single day I drew a breath from a universe with her in it. And it is a gift that she continues to give. Because she helped me find my light.

She knew my light. When I thought I was a petulant brat, lazy, good-for-nothing, spoiled, self-centered, she knew who I was. She saw the light that she first noticed when they handed me to her on April 8, 1977, on Good Friday shortly after 7:48 PM. She knew that light was there when I doubted like Thomas.

I never allowed myself to believe that I was as special as she told me I was.

And now I’m drawn to yellow because I need that light. I need that reminder. I need that beacon.

And I find it in the love around me and I have 49 years of love infused in me by the most loving human being, the matrix of all that is love. I once heard that the word matter has a similar root to matrix, meter, measure, mater, mother and it would make sense for approximately nine months our Mother is our universe and then that universe opens into just another matrix of matter and nothing really matters but how we love each other and hold space and what is space but the mother of all and I twist up like a universal torus and torque myself into tortured fits of sadness…

But all that was is and will be. If you trace it back into the depths of consciousness and unconsciousness past the collective unconscious, make a right at the game room and a left at the pool, dive into the deep end and slip through the dimensional drain because at the root of it all it is.

Mom gave me this gift. She gave me this universe, this matrix and somehow kept glowing an ember of my true Self that is starting to ignite ever so faintly in my solar plexus.

Mom in a yellow shirt… I couldn’t look. My eyes weren’t adjusted to the light.
Instead, I drew a line, I drew a line for you… and it was all yellow.

I know, what a thing to do.

Somewhere, outside of all of this, where space and time are just mechanical relics like sextants or GPS, we are in communion.