Megan Stielstra's Blog

Our friend Kat is living with us, which is awesome for many reasons, one of which is that she’s an artist and the house is full of projects. In the dining room there are huge papier mache puppets. Of books. Books that are alive and have teeth—props for an upcoming play. They’re spread out on the table, the wet, gluey newspaper drying under box fans. The back porch is strung with clotheslines hung with coffee-stained paper, dripping onto tarps spread over the floor. Her computer is set up in the kitchen, surrounded by CDs of her photographs. In the living room, in a corner of the couch, is a brick-colored Queen-sized afghan she’s three-quarters finished knitting. There’s an easel set up in the back bathroom, tubes of paint on the sink, paint and plaster on her clothes and her fingers, canvases stacked against the walls. Some of them we hang up—a black-and-white portrait of her Uncle as a child, her grandmother on a porch swing, two trees with the branches intertwined—and let me tell you, this girl is good. Lately, she’s been working on a self-portrait: her spiky red hair, her freckles, shocking ice-blue eyes. It’s a sad portrait, her mouth turned down, eyes empty and glassy. I didn’t recognize that painted girl with my laughing, grinning friend.

This morning, I woke up and looked at the canvas: it’s gone. She painted over it, a new, white, blank space waiting to be filled. “Why’d you do that?” I asked as we made breakfast, and she said, simply, “I didn’t want to see myself like that anymore.”

I thought that was the greatest thing in the Universe.

There’s this scene in my favorite movie, The Princess and the Warrior: Bodo and Sissi are in the car, and Bodo’s being his usual unhappy, negative, miserable self. They stop for gas, and while they’re at the station another Bodo (same character, played by the same guy) watches them interact. He stands right next to them, yet Sissi and the first Bodo don’t see him (and continue not seeing him as the scene continues). When it’s time to leave, all three of them get in the car—Sissi in the passenger seat, the mean Bodo driving and the new Bodo in the backseat. He watches the other two in the rearview mirror for a while, and by his facial expressions you can tell he doesn’t like how the mean Bodo is acting: how he treats Sissi, how he scowls. At one point she tries to take his hand but he throws it away. After a while, Bodo-in-the-backseat reaches his arms around either side of mean Bodo’s head and covers his eyes. The car screeches to a halt and mean Bodo sits there, trying to figure out what’s going on, while backseat Bodo gets out of the car and opens the driver’s side door. He reaches in and grabs mean Bodo, pulling him out into the street, and the two of them stare at each other—the same man, same clothes, same everything (like that moment in Terminator II where the chunky security guard is face-to-face with himself, except it’s really the TX liquid metal Terminator who stabs him in the head with his liquid metal spear arm). Then, the second Bodo gets into the driver’s seat, closes the car door and drives off with Sissi, leaving mean nasty Bodo at the side of the road. He reaches over and takes Sissi’s hand. He smiles at her. He smiles at himself in the rearview mirror, and I’m sitting there thinking, “Wow. It really CAN be that easy. You really can just see yourself acting unhappy, bringing yourself down or whatever, and you can make a conscious decision to leave that behind,” which was the same thing I thought this morning when Kat painted over her sad self, leaving the canvas blank and ready for the good stuff yet to come.