Status Updates From Pop Song: Adventures in Art...

The whole time, I'd always been grabbing, grabbing, grabbing. Trying to take time and make it fit the story I was trying to tell. I'd tried so hard to write our narrative before it could be fixed, trying to live up to my impossible expectations. I'd done it all in the name of protecting myself - maybe protecting you too - but in doing so, I hadn't listened to what either of us were really trying to say.

Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking. I related to the term abject so much that I made endless puns about it: abject permanence, abject story, abject of your affection. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified.

All along I'd had the sense that something was different about the way men treated me, different from the free-spirited adolescent romances I'd grown up watching and reading. No one had told me it was going to be different for me. That it would feel so much harder to be loved. I felt crazy for not understanding.

Two years after the retrospective closed, I'd get a tattoo of Agnes's last drawing. A small, looping sketch of a potted plant, the lines shaky, as if done in ballpoint pen -= more an idea of a plant than the plant itself, its species unidentifiable. It occurs to me now that, at the end of her life, she did return to the material, the explicable, and through the movement of her hand, make it inexplicable again.