A lot of times people have asked me if making Combat Paper is healing, or if it heals me, or if it is “cathartic” and more often than not I want to choke them for missing the point. If they looked in my eyes instead of asking stupid questions they would know, but nobody has the patience or the mental fortitude for real eye to eye contact these days.
To answer their question now, in the lengthy fashion that their foolish question unravels, of course. To make art “heals” by systematically rooting out our demons and, if not destroying them, making us get to know them better.
As an example I will submit this testimonial.
Last night I began to pace. I had known something was wrong all day. I was finishing one piece of work, one portion of my thesis on patience and art and beauty during all of the fucked up barbarian bullshit that passes for policy these days, and I had no other piece to go to now but I knew, in some feral recess of myself, that I could not stop.
This last piece had become a prayer and it had left me feeling cleansed and relieved with having so thoroughly investigated the memories and the minutia of the things which have lain dormant inside of me since our initial impression. It left my hands feeling beautiful and well used. The love that I experienced for this piece was something I cannot justly speak of, it was so overwhelming to describe it would sound hokey and put me ill at ease. The love of myself. Finally. After so much wasted hatred I can finally look back on that boy and love him and his bony fingers and his devout attention to detail. And I still love him. I am proud of him and I am proud of what he has made and all the things he had to learn to finally say what he had been meaning to say.
But pride lasts just a little longer than a few shots of whiskey and that day without was coming and I had the shakes. I needed to be back in that sweet memory zone. So I went for another walk to the cemetery. Its becoming a daily ritual. As I walked I took stalk of the sweetness of the sadness in my heart and it reminded me of how it felt with Jen when I had first come home.
There were no two more sad people than Jen and I that summer, and our sadness grew into a fierce passion. Every day we would smoke away our despair inside of her smoldering apartment. We were always half dressed and we knew the days not by the sun but by the revolutions of our love, when the CatPower album always played that song and whatever black things we kept inside of us mingled in her sheets.
We were two artists who passionately wanted to die, but instead chose to fuck and smoke ourselves to a slower, more painful death.
She was the first person that I bared myself to. In her bed I exposed her to the shock and the awe I carried in my heart and she shared with me the slow and steady pain of a whole life of chronic depression. We breathed each others toxins into our lungs all summer until I couldn’t breath anymore and I left her in her room crying while I moved to Chicago.
I had drawn a picture of us together during our summer. I thought that it had captured the silent numbness of our constants. I kept it all this time to remind me of our love that we shared because after it passed there was never anything that was that pure again. I hid my sadness from everyone until they could see that I was trying to keep it locked away and everything felt guilty and untrue because I could not bring myself to love anyone like I had loved Jennifer… in that way that we hurt each other by sharing the reality of our depression. I was going to fake happiness forever, or so I thought.
I was a fucking idiot.
Last night I carved this picture into a linoleum block. I lost track of time as I was occupied pouring over my memories of her bed and her skin and her bony fingers and the unfinished paintings she had filled her apartment with, too lost in despair to complete them. I remembered our walks for cigarettes and our hot summer night stoop sessions and during all of these memories I know that we barely said a word to each other. We were two silent and beautiful ghosts living in a haunted war story.
My Depression Era lover.
I want so badly to go back in time and to convince myself that down this road I chose is only foolishness and solitude and that there is no summer that will come that was as true as that one was.
But I know that that summer was only what it was because my emotions were slingshot from Hell and everything was new again and I thought that I could grow forever. But my soul is now a fallow crop because I over harvested what little was left after the deployment and I again yearn for the slow and mellow afternoons when, for all we knew (if we even gave a fuck to care) it could have been the 1920’s.
I saw her again last summer. We sat on her new stoop and we talked about art and I knew that I still loved her as much as I had that summer and that I still wanted it but she could barely stomach the sight of me really. She had hated me so fiercely that years ago, when I had tried to go back to that town to find her, I was warned by the barrista at Rocket Star that I should never see her again.
I broke her heart by leaving. It was the first of many. Now I am not worried about a lack of memories to surf through and to bind into reality the few morsels that I have left. In fact I feel overwhelmed by the pile of memories sitting on the desk in my head, files upon files of cute notes, letters, beautiful memories and quick, unreasonable departures.
Instead of a memoir I will make a multimedia installation of my memories in an attempt to catalog them. I know that it is good art because I don’t care if I sell it. I don’t want to sell it. I just need to make it. Now that the idea is hatched I know that unless I complete this task I will go insane.
I smoke my cigarettes alone now. I think of her often when I do. It is the disease that she gave me in kind for the broken heart.
She said that she quit, but she still smoked with me.
The Paper Trail 
so it is healing! !!