Change cuts into my flesh because I push against it. I push so hard that what could have been soft and gentle in another lifetime enters my reality like bits of the road hitting a car windshield on the freeway. Change chips away at me like this, because I let it.

My body feels like broken glass. Did I break it?

Change comes from inside me and it bubbles up, sometimes slowly like magma, and other times, quickly, like coca cola. The fizz gets inside my nose and it hurts.

When it is the magma version it can be too thick for my nose or eyes or ears. It is not watery enough to be held in my tears. This is when my skin cracks like old acrylic, and all sorts of colors ooze out. Colors that I did not know existed. They say that the human mind is so limited, that you can never imagine a color you haven’t seen before. This is true. I cannot imagine a color that I haven’t seen, and I cannot imagine a future I haven’t lived. But with time, change brings me both.

In change I find the colors of love and pain. I find deep reds and light violets and almost black blues. I find the grainy dirt-orange color of my unfettered anger, and the godly golden hue of my nostalgia.

In change I find that I cannot hang on to mamma, or daddy, or you, or anyone to stop it from sweeping me away. I cannot hang on to the frail shadow of what it was like to be sixteen years old. I cannot hang on to the bones of the chicken and beet stew I used to eat at the kitchen counter. I cannot hang on to the cold stones from the river of camping trips with friends. I cannot hang on to the wonderful feeling that followed us when we were together, and so in love. Maybe the wonderful is the most fleeting.

Or maybe, some things stay the same, though recently I’m beginning to think that’s something we tell ourselves to feel better. And because I don’t really believe it, I don’t really feel better at all.

To accept change, I’ve been told to let things go. To accept the inevitable. But how can I let go of the only experiences, the only colors, that I know? I can’t even imagine new colors to take their place! When I think of letting go, is when change hurts the most. I hang on by tooth and nail to things that are no longer there, and then all of a sudden, I am no longer here.

I am, Nutella two months past its expiration date, still somehow sitting in the fridge. I am, an unlikely snow day in the middle of May. I am, out of place, out of time, with no sense of the future and no grasp of the past. How did I end up here?

My plan was so simple, and it went so wrong. I decided not to move, and not to change anymore. I liked things the way that they were, but I forgot that it doesn’t matter if I don’t move on. Everyone and everything will never stop moving, and never stop changing. And this realization is where the colors come.

They flow out of my fingertips and into the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. Reds and greens and yellows and blues!

I am tired of sitting still!

They are here to sweep me away and finally, for the first time in a year and a half, I think, I feel like me again. Different, unexpected, but me. I welcome the tide and I pick up the paintbrush and as the colors come out I find myself an artist again! I can’t believe I wasted my time, sitting here, feeling like an expired jar of nutella.

Now, I am getting ready to move. I pack my bags and in them I bring with me everyone I have loved and every feeling I have felt, because now it is so clear that change is not about letting go. If I had to let go of all of that to change, then I would sit in stagnant suffering forever because all of that is everything I am! At least, everything I am so far.

And I will never let them go. I don’t need to let them go. I will bring all of it with me. Things change, but that can never erase what was. It will never change who I was or what I learned or who I loved. The new colors I am finding now do not make the ones already on my canvas less vibrant.

I am painting! With words and with thoughts!

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I am also painting with literal paint!

Today in my art class we had to paint following a vague instruction list. One hundred grey X’s here, some purple lines there, and so on. Every artist followed the same list, and every painting was drastically different.

I painted and I listened to Queen. I owe my entire rock music taste to my dad, or more accurately my love for him and the way we spent time. I looked at the eggplant purple on my brush. My mom inspired my love of painting, and also my love of fried eggplant, or begun bhaja in Bangla.

In the strokes of blue I thought about summer love and the walls of my bedroom where we would laze around and laugh all day. In the yellow I thought about how an old friend and I used to chase sunshine on partly cloudy days. In the pink I thought of my older sister — not by blood, but by heart — and our years worth of summers living and growing up together.

In my colors I see all these things that no longer are, but that always will be.

I am on step six now. My painting is beautiful. I don’t want it to change. But then there is step seven: Wipe one section of your painting with a wet cloth, and repeat steps 1-6.

I wondered what it was all for. All the detailed work I had done was going to be covered? Begrudgingly, I did it all over again, and It was not until I reached these last three steps that I understood.

 

 

 

Every color, texture, memory or feeling you paint over is still there. It still matters. It shows and adds even when new colors are put around or on top. Change is not about a clean canvas or a blank slate. Each step may not seem better than the next, but the new colors you add don’t erase the colors you have. Each step may not look the way you wanted, but it is still important to keep taking them.

So yes, I guess some things do stay the same. As new colors wash over me, I know that there is no erasure in change. That is a constant.

What was there will always be there, somewhere.

And what’s to come?

That’s up to time, life, my paintbrush, and me.