Rainy Day
by Doris Neidl
It’s the price of rootlessness.
Motion sickness.
The only cure: to keep moving.
(Tony Kushner)
On days like this — rainy day — she liked to stay in bed. Thinking about life. A life with wooden floors and plants, paintings everywhere, morning coffee with long conversations, friends and love, but always painting, drawing the whole day. So, romance, unrealizable, or not?
Maybe she was not suited for this life — was not living the way she should live — with a husband and children, and a regular income. Sometimes it was unbearable when people asked her: What are you doing all day? Doing art was just not enough to be considered as a normal survivor. She hadn’t — compared to others — money or, as many had advised her, a rich man. She had to explain why it was worth painting, as if she had to explain why it was worth living, had to specify projects to qualify as an artist. Had to defend herself, had to take heart to continue painting again and again. And than she longed for him, did not know how it had happened that she did not dare to tell him the clear truth, tell him what she felt — namely: him. Wanted to be in his arms again — but he was far away in his thoughts — where? Antarctica? Or?
She just wanted her art, creating something that is worth being seen. But all together, everything was done in an outrageous loneliness. She thought: alone.
She was afraid, long-suppressed desire, wanted to get to know him. Knew him from the first time she saw him, got closer, approach, closer and closer. And then withdrawal, out of fear of being hurt. And before she left, their eyes met and they looked into the future’s face, and words were missing. Words that couldn’t explain the love for each other. And now she remembered his eyes, their quite time, before they moved into each other’s body, slow and warm. She wanted to call him — always, but didn’t dare, because their mood, distant and foreign.
Sometimes she yearned for a feeling of security. Someone or maybe just a place where she would be at home. But she ran from one city to the next, restless, rootless. She liked looking at a globe and longed for all those countries she had not seen yet. All the places, mysterious and new that gave her the strength to paint. The only thing she really knew. She wanted to paint and to love. And nothing else.
Doris Neidl is an Austrian born artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria, and in Brooklyn, NY. She studied at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria, and graduated in 1996 with an MFA. Her work has appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her writings have been published by several publications and in 2008/2009 she received a writing grant from the Austrian Government BMUKK for her project “The Women in Symbols.” She has participated in short and long-term artist residences in the United States, France, Italy and Czech Republic. Doris Neidl is online at DorisNeidl.com.
