by Allison Lee
My body is a museum.
A grand, architectural building bricked and buttressed to be beautiful in a way that only certain people can appreciate. It houses my beauty and my suffering, for I have been told that is what humans are ultimately reduced to (in the non-scientific sense). And for those brave-hearted tourists who dare to venture, both are on display for all to see. Free of charge! The ticket is simply sincerity.
My body is not a temple.
Because not everyone who stops by treats it with respect. Not everybody sees it as holy and neither do I. So, my body is a museum; open to the songbird praises and unsolicited criticisms. What one person finds beauty in, another will find disgust; but my body is a work of art regardless of the opinions of another.
Chambers of my heart were painted by Van Gogh in pure, sunflower yellow. To him, yellow was the happiest of colors; a belief he held so firm that he downed pints of the pigment. I do not disagree, simply add on the fact that half-part of the yellow resembles acid. The taste of the world and its many injustices I have witnessed. It’s a taste that simmers inside of what sustains me, dyeing the walls permanently lest I forget how it feels to be sour.
Michelangelo is to thank for the frescoes and sculptures on the upside of my skull. He found it a rather challenging canvas, but I think it’s rather marvelous. The important people he sculpted out of marble, the remaining ones he depicted in paintings. Pivotal chapters of my life are detailed through his immaculate techniques and brushstrokes, each one heavy with purpose and significance.
Crafter of my eyes—Georges Seurat. Point by point did he dot on my pupils, creating a world that will never be crisp enough to be taken in because when the world and all its lines are blurry, I must depend on my heart and head to make judgment. To feel and think that much more than the average, and in consequence, to live that much more. Seurat understood how impactful dots can be; after all, what is planet Earth but a blue dot in the cosmic scale of things?
Frida Kahlo weaved my veins and vessels. She fully grasped that more than life was identity and death. Colors of her work bleed within me, flowing to all parts of me that sync in perfect harmony to work toward my death, to figure out my identity, to walk toward my ultimate place in a canvas this vast.
Dali was invited to add the finishing touches, for it is far better to walk the line between dreams and reality than to be confined to either. What’s the fun in rationality without free imagination? The world is already bleak and dull and dying; might as well throw in an elephant with legs like those of giraffe necks and clocks that melt like hot wax. His final additions are why I see things between towers of clouds, why unlikely creations bring on revolutions centuries too loud.
I am The Mona Lisa, The Scream, The Starry Night, and Las Meninas; I am the mysterious, the panic, the abstract, and the complex. This museum, broken down to its core, is a blueprint of who I am. It houses my battle scars and history. It tells my story. Each painting a lesson learned, each exhibition a being loved. And if you can’t see through the colors and lines for who I truly am,
the exit is to your left.