THE ARTIST
by Emma Arnesty-Good
Stephan lies on the slide of the play structure, teenage body spilling over its edges, arm draped across his face to shield him from the sun. It is only my third week of work at the residential mental health program where Stephan lives, but so far, the part I most feared has not been difficult at all. I thought it would be hard to imagine that these teenagers could go on to lead rich and meaningful lives. But it is easy to see that they all have their own brilliance despite their significant struggles.
With his eyelids closed, Stephan tells me that his vision looks black.
“I wonder if this is what death will feel like,” he says.
My gut pulses, and I sit a little taller on the woodchips beside him. I know I am meant to respond. In
training, they told us the worst thing is to not respond.
“Do you think about that a lot?” I ask. “What death will feel like?”
“No,” he says. “It’s not like that. I’m only thinking about it right now.”
He is savvy by now; he knows I am gauging the severity of his feelings. Stephan has been at the residen-
tial mental health program for eight weeks, longer than I’ve been working here. He knows all the abbrevia- tions and insurance terminology, and he can lead the routine group check-ins better than I can. He knows that I am a mandated reporter, required by law to tell a government agency of any known child or elderly abuse. He knows that his mood and tone in this conversation will be documented in a daily log that will ar- rive in his therapist’s inbox later today. Clinically, these actions are meant to support and protect our clients, but personally, they can feel invasive. Even if he is lying, if he does think about death all the time, I do not blame him for wanting privacy.
Stephan turns his face slightly to keep his eyes out of the bright sun. I move the woodchips around with my idle fingers. The square chips are the size of my thumbprint but with two beveled edges. When turned perpendicular, one woodchip’s edge is sharp enough to dig into the sharp edge of another and stand up like the unlucky center pieces of a Jenga puzzle.
“Do you remember the other day when Ian and I were supposed to serve you guys dinner?” I ask, and he lets me continue. “We were both new, so we didn’t know how to run the dinner meeting, and you finally said, ‘Can we eat already?’”
His lips part into a smile, so easy like butter. He uncovers his eyes and looks at me, turning his body sideways on the plastic slide.
“That was funny, though,” he says, smirking. He’s watching my fingers as they push the woodchips into each other, balancing one atop the other. I hold up my stack when I get five in a row. He nods.
“I like your ring,” he says, pointing to my right hand.
“Can you tell what it is?” I take it off and hand it to him. He sits up to receive it.
“No, what is it?” he asks, turning it slowly in front of his face.
“It was made from a quarter,” I tell him. “See? It says ‘1994’.”
He smiles. “That’s dope,” he says.
I want him to keep his eyes open, want to be the reason he is not looking at death behind his eyelids.
I hold up my woodchip structure, six pieces stacked up this time. I tell him about Andy Goldsworthy, the Scottish sculptor who makes his art out of impermanence—leaves, stone, ice. I ask Stephan about his raps, which he sometimes scribbles in thin notebooks. He tells me it’s Stephan with an “f ” who writes those.
“What does Stephan with a “ph” write?” I ask.
“Poems,” he says.
I look down at my sculpture and manage to add a seventh woodchip to my stack. I hold it up for him to see.
“That’s dope,” he says again. He swings his feet over the edge of the beige slide and reaches down to pick up a woodchip.
“Everyone is an artist,” he says. “They just don’t know it.”
I want to tell him that what he has said is important, that if there is anything that will help him survive this hard time in his life, it will be this simple belief.
When I was fifteen, I too contemplated death on sunny days. It was something I kept to myself, wait- ing until after my parents had gone to bed before unwrapping my sadness in the low light of my bedroom.
Alone, I made all kinds of decisions about my value based on the assumption that I would never be ex- traordinary, never perfect, and thus never happy. I saw my own suicidal ideation as just another item in the pile of evidence that I was bad and unlovable. I could not see my own brilliance nor conceive of its existence. I feared that watching teenagers struggle with this same lack of sight would send me back into that fraught place and leave me unable to convince them to live because, really, what is the point if you never feel good enough? But once you decide that there is brilliance without perfection, it is easier to see that everyone is brilliant. Once you decide that brilliance is abundant, it is easier to think you might have some. Everyone is an artist; they just don’t know it.
“That’s so true, Stephan,” I say. My tower of woodchips loses its balance, falls back into the pile from which it came. I’m supposed to model good coping skills, so I try to hide my disappointment. He watches my face.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll just start over.”
I begin again with two woodchips. Stephan lies back down on the slide and places his arm across his face. I wonder if the moment is lost.
“It looks yellow now, or maybe pink,” he says. “What does?” I ask.
“My eyelids—they don’t look black anymore.”
Talking Head
mixed media
Geoffrey Geiger