Wavering in my Unwavering

Unwavering belief is a heat I keep under my tongue. It tinges everything I touch. A little altar I made out of hunger and paint rags. I tell myself it’s the only honest engine: you pick the thing that makes your chest widen, that bright animal, and you believe in it without blinking. Belief felt like a clean hallway: walk straight, keep walking, the door will eventually be a door. It made sense to be feral and bright and useless to the market, because the only person I was risking was the same animal who signed the risk. There was charm in being half-broke and absolutely convinced as if the world would eventually concede out of sheer exhaustion. 

Back when it was just me, this was clean. A bowl of rice every other day and a room that smelled like linseed and worry. I could be poor and proud and dangerously single-minded, the little monk of turpentine and half-finished songs, the calendar measured by how many canvases were stacked like teeth in the corner. Unwavering belief was the stray dog I kept naming even when the collar was slipping off. It followed me through rooms, shedding certainty, curls at my feet while I paint. When I try to put it outside, it learns how to work the doorknob. It understands only one trick (stay) and it performs it even when the house is flooding with bills.

But now the creed has a second mouth to answer to. Mel’s name rings like a tuning fork against my teeth. I can hear the pitch of it even when the studio is loud. Linseed, rag dust, the fridge clicking like insects. The air changes when I say her name. Mel’s back is a new continent of labor. I live off its weather and dare call it destiny. She didn’t sign the contract I wrote with breath in a bathroom mirror. She did not enroll in my monastery of maybe. She didn’t vow devotion to the tender hallucination that if I press hard enough into a canvas the rent will blink first. She married me, not my thesis about devotion as a currency. She works while I kneel at the altar of the improbable, and even if I call it holy, the bag of groceries doesn’t care. The miracle of a painting cannot be returned for store credit. I keep trying to translate the language of color into the language of bills and it comes out as a stammer. Inside me it’s summer, ripe and forgiving. Outside, there are numbers with small knives.

I keep circling the same argument with myself until the argument starts to look like a prayer. What is belief if it never gets tested by a real person’s exhaustion? What is love if it can’t ask belief to sit down and be quiet for one minute? I look at Mel’s back when she leaves for work and I hate the shape of that sentence. The world wants its hours. It wants your spine, your mornings, your small tender plans. It eats and says thank you through a smile that’s also a receipt. The choice feels counterfeit: be poor and honest with your craft, or sell your days to someone who’s already eaten their fill. As if there are only two doors and they both lead to the same fluorescent break room.

I tell myself this is what we’re born for. Making things, loving each other, leisure like an actual sacrament. Then I open my phone and the machine hums its hymn. Flesh-cog, be efficient. I can’t stomach it. It’s embarrassing to say out loud, like admitting I’m allergic to reality. Everyone else clocks in, makes it work, finds a vein to plug into. I try but feel physically wrong, like I’m forcing a bone into the wrong joint. Mel can do it; she’s stronger, or smarter, or just more willing to stand near the fire without calling it divinity. She mentions Atlanta and the sentence feels like a window that opens both directions. Comfort has a map there, money has a memory and the roads remember her. I get that. In this borrowed house with thin walls and no angles you can lean on, the work has to squeeze itself into hours that don’t believe in it either. The world is a vending machine that only accepts punch cards. Insert eight, receive a paper smile and a receipt in a language you’ll never speak fluently. Everything here has a barcode except the reasons you keep breathing. They want you to be a polite organ inside a very large animal called Productivity. The animal has many stomachs and an excellent LinkedIn profile. I try to remind myself there are more than two doors. 

Door A: devotion with a coupon for poverty. 

Door B: surrender but with a dental plan. My tooth hurts. 

There must be a hidden hinge somewhere, a trapdoor under the rug of common sense. I check the corners. I peel the wallpaper and find a mural of saints haggling over the price of time. Above them a banner: PLEASE REMAIN EFFICIENT DURING YOUR SPIRITUAL CRISIS.

Momentum is happening anyway. A contract with a gallery, a studio that breathes at the same rate I do, a solo on the calendar like a star I can point to without lying. The canvases respond, animals finally letting me touch the rib. It’s progress in a language I actually speak, but the slope is syrup and the urgency of our life is granite. This is the strangest part: watching the thing you wanted start to open while the actual ground under your feet gets more brittle. It feels like I’m winning a dream and losing a day. I sleep beside the canvases and wake up beside a math problem and the clock on the wall insists on dialects: rent-time, grocery-time, how-long-can-you-keep-doing-this-time. The hands keep pointing to a place I can’t afford.

I think about success and feel queasy in a room that smells faintly of bleach. Someone in an expensive shirt says the word “brand” and a small part of me tries to climb out a window. What would “making it” even mean if the price is to become a factory of my own insides? To let the work be packaged into versions of itself until I can’t hear its original animal in the noise? The fantasy of success is a room where the light’s always on but there are security cameras in every corner. I can see myself there: professionalized, archived, smiling like I agreed to be owned. The thought breeds nausea and a second nausea at the privilege of my nausea, because who am I to gag at the very meal we keep saying we need.

There’s shame folded into the bundle, it's thick and damp. I can’t seem to do what other people do: grow the necessary exoskeleton, clock in, perform the consensual forgetting. The body of me does not recognize the harness. It bucks and then apologizes and then bucks harder. And then there is Mel, steady, carrying a sky I claim to worship, asking reasonable questions with tired eyes. Is there even a plan that isn’t just me believing beautifully?

Meditation used to help more. It was an inner room where things slowed into shapes I could carry. Now it feels like polishing a window while the house is on fire. Transpersonal psychology, prayer, all the elegant frameworks: they make impeccable sense and then bounce off the fact that somebody has to pay for toothpaste and Mel is that somebody. I keep finding abundance in my head like loose change in a dream and waking to pockets turned inside out. I try to speak the language of gratitude without it sounding like a trick. I try to hold the paradox without cutting my hand. I’ve read the manuals: abundance is a faucet, gratitude is the wrench, mindset is the plumber. I twist; the pipes clear their throats and cough up two coupons for optimism and a faint smell of pennies. Meanwhile the world wants an answer that isn’t a koan. 

There’s a part of me that wants to quit belief the way you quit a drug. Just stop. Seal the jars of pigment and let the color harden. Put on the uniform and join the choreography everyone else knows. There’s another part, feral and bright, that refuses to learn the steps, that wants to bite through the leash and run until the lungs feel like clean paper. On certain nights both parts talk at once and the room fills with a noise only I can hear. I tell myself I’m not special; but why does the compromise feel like poison? 

If this is hell, it’s tastefully decorated. If this is purgatory, the lighting is exquisite. Every day the same audition: can you hold two knives in your body and not get cut in half? Can someone love you if their body is paying the toll for your myth? How long does belief stay honest before it just becomes good branding for failure? I keep saying I’m an artist like a password. The door opens, but it’s always the door inside me. The outer doors are locked by fees and forms and a patience I haven’t earned.

I try on practicality like a suit two sizes wrong. The sleeves whisper: you could learn to love fluorescent light. My ribs say: this fabric is made of needles. The mirror says I look “approachable.” At night I inventory my skills like canned goods after a storm. Paint. Music. A freakish ability to argue with a blank surface until it opens a tiny door. Some days the door leads somewhere. Some days it opens into a hole that looks seductively like a room. I keep falling in love with the echo because it’s fluent in me.

Belief keeps multiplying like rabbits in a hat. One moment I’m certain, the next moment certainty has five cousins and a newsletter. I walk the block of my head with it on a leash. Every corner there’s a sign that reads “This Way to Purpose” with arrows pointing everywhere. I tie belief to a parking meter and go buy a responsible thought; by the time I’m back it has charmed a crowd, auditioned for holiness, and learned a new trick called “What If We Don’t Need Money Anymore?” We all clap, but the meter expired.

I keep seeing the same coin: on one side a man smiling with all his teeth, on the other side the exact same man, slightly more polished. I throw the coin into a fountain that is actually a spreadsheet disguised as water. The spreadsheet thanks me for my contribution, amortizes my longing, and adjusts my destiny by two decimal places. A pigeon wearing a tiny MBA certificate lands on my shoulder and says, “Have you considered networking?” I give the pigeon my last crumb of mysticism. The pigeon starts a startup and sells me a subscription to my own dream at a slight discount.

What I want is embarrassingly simple: mornings that don’t require bargaining, rooms that say yes quietly, tools that remember my name, hours that don’t hiss when I touch them, a door I can close without apologizing to the hinges, a kitchen where the dishes can be left unphilosophized. A way to measure life that doesn’t require either sainthood or a punch clock. A stretch of time long enough to forget the price of it, to let belief roam without a leash and come back only when it’s bored. I want to measure a life in near-misses, deep breaths, and the number of times I refused the wrong door without becoming a sermon about it. 

On certain nights I imagine a festival where nobody rents their lungs. Booths of leisure. A raffle for naps. The mayor is a retired thunderstorm. Currency is replaced by the exact sound a brush makes when it finds the right pressure. People bring their failures like pies and everyone takes a slice. There’s a parade of obsolete clocks and a dunk tank for hustle culture staffed by very polite ghosts. I wake and the festival is still inside me, passing out maps to doors I haven’t found.

In the morning I go back to the studio like a pilgrim with practical shoes. I mix color with the seriousness of surgery. I staple belief to wood and ask it to behave. Sometimes the canvas opens a small blue door. Sometimes it doesn’t and I tap the wall, listening for hollowness. When a painting finally breathes, the room rearranges its furniture to make space. It isn’t money, but it’s proof that matter can remember me.

This is the part where I usually write myself into a lesson. I don’t have one. All I have is the animal that follows me, the machine that wants me, the festival that visits, the woman who is more than any of these sentences, and the ongoing trick of making something from the very substance that insists it can’t be made into anything. If belief is a delusion, it’s a useful one. If it’s magic, it’s the kind that leaves fingerprints on the glass and refuses to wash them off.

I think about Atlanta like a punctuation mark. I think about a studio with a door that closes and the way privacy is a kind of funding. I think about Mel’s voice when she laughs for real, not the laugh that tries to comfort me out of my own guilt. I think about the first time a painting sold and how it felt like oxygen had a flavor. I think about the last time we both slept without the math crawling up the bed. I think about belief not as a weapon but as a strange animal I’ve been feeding for years. It’s loyal. It sits. It ruins the furniture.

Maybe the only honest sentence is that I don’t know how to hold this without dropping us. Maybe the second honest sentence is that I keep painting anyway, as if the act itself were a rope. It isn’t resolution; it’s habit plus heat. I keep saying Mel in my head like a metronome. The world keeps spinning its crank. My pockets turn out their linings. The canvas opens a small blue door and I walk through, again, and again, and again.