After seeing the picture on Facebook of the girl I had screwed over nearly two decades ago, I turned off my phone and the lights and closed my eyes, and thought about how time can talk through pictures on the wall.
Back in 2001, I found myself laying on a beach in the Algarve region of Portugal, realizing I had irreconcilably sabotaged yet another relationship. But this one was different. Sixteen years later, I was standing in an art gallery in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, and felt the past calling to me through a painting like the hand of time reaching through a wormhole.
I had flown to Rio De Janeiro with a friend who owned a condo there, in 2015. The rental company for that condo had apparently been stealing the rent money being paid by the tenant, instead of paying the mortgage. So my friend had to fly down to sort this out. With the help of a friend he knew from Brazil, since neither he nor I spoke a lick of Portuguese at the time, he'd gone to stand in long lines in tall buildings, while I ventured into a nearby art museum.
There were three floors and too many rooms to count, with many of the rooms containing various different kinds of art. After having surveyed most of the galleries, I ventured lastly into a small room off the main floor, one filled with more abstract paintings.
The room was shaped like a shoe box, maybe eighty by forty feet in dimensions, with a wall in the middle that was open at both ends of the room. People mulled about in both directions around the wall like monkeys ambling around a monolith, looking at the paintings hanging on either side, as well as those on the opposing outside walls.
As I stopped to look at a painting on the inside wall, a woman stopped to look at the painting hanging on the opposite wall, directly across from me. A few minutes later, after we had both absorbed the respective paintings we were drinking in through our eyes, she walked on. And as she did, I noticed, for the first time, that the colors of the painting she was looking at, were her.
The painting she had been looking at was an abstract painting, that looked almost like the iris of an eye or a flower. It was as if someone had dropped a water balloon filled with red paint on it. At the center of the painting, it looked as if someone had then dropped a much smaller water balloon filled with black paint. But the paint was thick, almost as if it were trying to crawl off the canvas, and into the world.
And after the girl walked away, I was struck by the realization that maybe it had! Either that, or the world - more specifically, my world - had somehow chased me down to that gallery, and crept onto that canvas.
The girl was dressed in a completely red outfit, it suddenly occurred to me, which just happened to match the red in the painting, and she had almost obsidian black skin. It was as if the painter had hurled his paint with such force at the canvas that it had passed through a window in time, like starlight traveling from a distant star that no longer existed. And out the other side of that window that paint poured, into the flesh, the ghost of my very own past.
Only then was I struck with a sudden realization that she was not alone in having been poured by that same painter into the room in which we both stood. As I looked back at the painting in front of me, remembering vaguely the colors I had been studying just moments before, I discovered I too had been looking into a mirror.
Much like the red and black painting, the painting I had been looking at was of a similar composition, but looked like the iris of an eye that was mostly shades of dark blue, with yellow and whites splashing from the center. I then looked at my own attire to notice that the colors in the painting were also me!
The feeling was truly surreal. What were the chances that a painter of two abstract pieces of art, would not only have those painting hanging on walls directly opposite each other, but would have two people - one from Rio and the other from Washington D.C. - standing there looking at them, at the exact same moment, and be exact human replicas of the paintings themselves?
That experience awakened me, like so many before and since, to the "magical realism" that exists in the world, that we too often miss because we are "distracted from distraction by distraction," as T.S. Eliot put it.
We are, as Eliot continues in Burnt Norton:
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before time and after.
After I left the art gallery, Eliot's words began echoing in my head like an augury, as I watched the crowd of people mulling about in the plaza outside. And like those "bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind that blows before and after time," my mind whirled on for three more years before I would fully understand the meaning of the colors in what I came to call "the girl in the wormhole gallery."
I was in the gym one day, a few years later, and a girl was working out next me. She was young, athletic, and attractive, and wearing the kind of outfit that dares men to ogle with indiscretion. But on this day, I was struck far more by what she was wearing rather than how she wore it. Her outfit was red and black. And on her socks, which were black and pulled up to her knee, was emblazoned the word "Rockstar."
It was then that my mind raced back to that art gallery in Brazil, and not just into that painting, by through it, all the way back to 2001, to a beach in the Algarve region of Portugal, where I had realized I had irreconcilably sabotaged yet another relationship. Only then did the meaning of the painting in the gallery in Brazil, and the girl in red and black, take on another dimension.
The relationship I had managed to so spectacularly sabotage, that stalked me across Europe and back again, began when we met in a dance club in Washington D.C. in 2000. She was dressed all in black, with long black boots that were as high as the socks the girl in the gym was wearing in 2018. She had the most beautiful obsidian skin I had ever seen. And on our first date, she wore a solid red dress, with a choker around her neck that said "Rockstar."
I never understood why she bothered to friend me on Facebook, maybe a decade after we had met. But as I turned off my phone and the lights, and closed my eyes, I thought about those paintings hanging forever opposite each other in that art gallery in Brazil, like the illicit lovers in Dante's Divine Comedy who were condemned forever to look at each other for their mistake, and I thought about how time could talk through pictures on the wall.
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