drawing in the air

Last night in the heat, the sky outside was lit from a distance, everything else was shadow,
the suburban industrial estate where I paint was quiet and still.
Listening to Allegri’s Miserere while painting a stolen fragment of Renaissance sky, I
looked up outside, and a huge albino fruit bat sailed directly overhead,
a white bat.
The miserere was written to be sung during Holy week. How appropriate! A week of painting is holy.
Midnight was long gone when I returned home, I wish I could stretch the days longer and longer.
Except that I love to sleep, I would never close my eyes on the day at all.

What I like to do, is live vicariously on a wild sea coast, where it isn’t hot, an imaginary place assembled from a few fragments of image. It simultaneously exists on a blinding blue coast, where it isn’t wild and cold. But I was hot to the core today, I felt like a blacksmith, and no thought of windswept rocks or rushing tidal straights could cool me down. So I only existed in one place, really, like a usual person.

I used to draw pictures in the sky with my finger,
Very complicated pictures, in an act of creation so completely engaging that it rendered me immobile , one finger pointing at the sky. Or at the roof of the church hall, where I was supposed to be doing some idiotic physical culture routine like all the other girls.
What IS that stary-pointing thing you do? would ask my mother, horrified at my isolated stillness among the moving bodies.
“Drawing,” I would reply, squinting out from between my messy plaits. Its just that my drawings were only visible to me.

I still like drawing in the air.