Frida

Once a beautiful young, fractured girl fell in love with powerful old man, who was famous, and twice her age. And winning him and being won by him, she picked him up and deposited him in her heart. From this vantage point, he wrapped her in ribbon and gave her as a gift to himself.

They married.

He painted the world and became famous.

She painted herself and became famously beautiful.

He had an affair.

And then, like a girl falling from a great building, she fell as if from a great height and landed in the street below.

And thus crushed, she took her famous, selfish old husband out of her heart and she put him in her head, right between her eyes, and from there he sent out his ropes and wrapped them around her neck, and she died quite completely.

He reached out to the world for praise, and received it.

She reached out to herself and touched her own face, and she gently tugged it off.

Her face in her hands, she crumbled it up into tiny pieces, added oil to it, and brushed it on a canvass.

She looked at her beautiful, dark, vibrant skin tones, her black shinning hair, her gorgeous eyebrows, and smiled. There she was, alive, lovely, bordered with deep, rich color, defiant on the canvass.

This soothed her, the removal of her face, the smearing it on canvass, the surrounding it in rich color, so she did it, again and again, removing her face, her hair, her eyes, her skin and her mighty eye brows and applying them to canvasses. She painted her feeling face, her stolid face, her thinking face, her angry face, her sad face, her dominated face, her proud face, her dead face, her being born face, her brave face and her terribly trapped and her lovely dying face too.

And so went her life; it was love and death and pain and beautiful paint.

And when she finally died at last, death was nothing at all to her, for she had died many times before. Dying was just like painting; it was just peeling off one of your faces and attaching it to a canvass so that you might put back on yet another of your many beautiful faces once again.

And what about her lovely face? Like her husband — it out lived her.