I'm Getting My Mojo Back
"it was never gone, loser"- my brother
I want to make a big mess. A giant mess. I want to scribble and color outside of the lines. Lately I think a lot about my childhood. How much I loved to play and dream and make messy things with my hands. I played a lot of dress up. I was a viking, a pirate, an astronaut, a queen. My mom and I played a game where we dressed up as imaginary characters named “Pepita” and “Mendrietta”. We had tea parties and wore lots of polka dots. I want to find this particular brand of magic. It seems I never actually lost it or gave it up, I just began prioritizing other things like money and meeting deadlines. I squeeze a raw lemon into my mouth to make it pucker. Stop growing up, V!! This is the biggest tragedy of all— losing our sense of childlike wonder.
Right now I’m drawn to shadow puppets, I find myself looking for pockets of light and morphing my body into different shapes. My favorite is The Giant Woman. My bestest friend taught me to embody her and I never want to let her go. Inspired by my favorite outfit that I wore as a child, I put on my favorite white overalls, my blue striped shirt that shows my belly button and I tie my hair into little buns. I hang paper stars and raindrops from my ceiling. I want to wake up and see the world I built for myself, full of rainstorms and rainbows and flowers and gems.
I recently pulled out my tempera paint sticks. They are big and fat and they only make thicks lines. I love them. They glide across my paper like jelly and I love watching how the colors change as I layer them. I have no idea what I’m doing. But I feel SO alive.
I pulled out my colored pencils. My old Prismacolors that I haven’t touched in probably ten years. When did I forget how to play? Why did I decide to grow up again? Being an adult is SO overrated. I’m bringing back PLAY. So I press hard with my colored pencils, until the colors are rich, and smooth, and warm like velvet. You might as well have poured hot cocoa with mini marshmallows into my soul.
I just finished gluing the **probably** 20,000th gem onto my bed frame. I pulled the Chariot card and realized that I spent the past 4 years decorating my own custom built chariot. I’ll use her to transport me to all my dreams. I chose a bight chartreusey yellow for my bedspread and lots of mismatched pillows with tiny pompoms and fur and sequins, perfect for mismatching. I dreamed this bed when I was little. When the only sheets I had were the hand me down ones some kind family gave to my dad. I know now, that I create my reality— so I want to be intentional about every shade of color that I use.
I’m still drawn to pastel clouds and I’ve realized that no matter how hard I try to pretend that I’m a different person now, I come back to blue and purple pink sunsets every time. I’m pretty sure if you cut me open, you’d find my stuffing is all made up of hundreds of little Lover clouds. I want to stop fighting the good things that happen to me. If want to write my own story I have to stop pretending to be someone that I’m not.
Maybe I’ll try finger painting. I want to have blue paint dried underneath my fingernails. I want to find glitter stuck to my elbows. I want to accidentally run my hair through wet clay. I want to roll on the ground with a blank canvas, painting it red with just my bare hands. Something about this sounds cathartic. Healing. God knows I’m still doing a lot of that.
I want to be okay with making bad art; art that sucks. But only if I have fun making it. After all, life is too hard to stop having fun. Life is too short to spend it doing things you hate. I want to spend the rest of my life, growing old with childhood wonder. At 80 years old, I hope I’ll be wearing neon pink tracksuits and heaps of sparkly gems and pearls. I hope my fingernails will still be tiny, colorful, exotic birds resting on the tips of my fingers. I hope I’m still mailing letters with confetti shaped liked golden stars. I hope every room in my house is painted a different color. I hope I’ll have spent my life surrounding myself with my dreams so that at the end of my life I look back and only see magic.
