At first glance, this piece feels chaotic, surreal, cartoonish – but like a memory, it’s layered. This is a story about a memory – about the ghosts we’re told to bury becoming the ones who shape us. A quiet opera for the emotionally maimed.
In junior high, I met an older girl – let’s call her TB. We were young and foolish, which is to say: perfect. Our connection was innocent – two kids slamming into each other’s loneliness. We filled the empty spaces with cigarettes, belly-laughs, and endless conversations. The kind of words that melt hours, that stitch you into someone else’s breath. Jane Says droned on her battered cassette deck – our unofficial anthem. The soundtrack to dirty mall pizza, ashtray afternoons, and the reckless hope only adolescence can invent. Like all beautiful things cursed by youth, it didn’t last.
My parents sat me down – “She’s unstable,” they said. “You’re forbidden from seeing her!” Forbidden? What a delicious word. What is this, freakin’ medieval times? I wasn’t their plow mule chained to the family crest. So I turned my speakers into gravestones and cranked Jane Says till the cones bled – played it for a year straight. Loud enough to make the walls remember her, even if no one else would.
In the artwork, the central figure – myself – is cracked like shattered glass, each fracture tracing the loss of connection. Inside, fish swim through murky, memory-filled waters I’ll never drain – symbols of emotion left unspoken, still drifting. That grief shaped me, and it shaped the art. Later, as the years thickened and I became the kind of man who walks with his eyes half-closed, I kept chasing her shadow in the bodies of other women, trying to prove something – to my parents, to myself: See? She wasn’t a monster. That struggle bleeds through the piece. Caution tape snakes across the scene like a crime scene – like a warning, though memory doesn’t obey. Bubblegum bubbles conceal sad faces. Neon graffiti whispers Remember Me, while teddy bears float with Xs for eyes. A quiet “fuck you” to anyone who asks if I’m okay. And behind the main character, a young cartoon version of me stares out, wide-eyed and broken, forever marking the moment I was forced to let TB go.
When I say I’m playing with the dead, I don’t mean ghosts. I mean the younger version of me who never got to say goodbye.
