By Steven Franco
Perpetually occurring and yet ephemeral moments arise for me where I feel overflowed with sensations beyond me—I feel freed from doubts and judgments and I explore the neglected crevices of my brain that feel shameful while turning off the well-cared for ones that I’d like for you to know about. It's in these caves that I explore where I gain an alternative understanding of the world that I exist in. I look up and the spaces between the clouds shrink and cover the blue in the sky making it a shade of gray that I can only find beautiful during these moments. On the greener grass that I look upon, I occupy a liminal solitary position feeling alone and yet connected to all of the people that I have never met. I see myself in the passenger seat with my head out the window at 60 miles per hour and feel all of that. Now, I sit in the driver’s seat and drive over the streets that I was once only known as a passenger to, sitting in the backseat and bucked into a car seat, perhaps. I drive over the street that leads to the beaches I grew up on, surrounded by the many people who raised me. As I drive I think of my skin that I grew out of that sticks to the leather of the car seat that I grew into. I feel a panicked peace that (re-)ignites a fire that found a home in me, and its smoke signals tell me to run. It wants me to run. I want to run. And feel the aches in my lungs that pound when I am out of breath because I am exhausted from doing things that matter to me. My legs shake under the surfaces of the desks that I work at. You tell me to stop, but I can’t. I have to satiate that urge to run in one way or another. When I paint, I feel frustrations like no other because I fail to paint the ways that I see the world, the ways that I want it to be, in colors that don’t exist. Sometimes, though, in these moments the paints that I squeeze from a crumpled metal tube seem to mix on their own and create colors that I’ve never seen before. Here is when my favorite color switched from yellow to blue and I began tip-toeing towards the precipice of my youth. When I am not painting, I sit in the library to study business with the billionaire that I should become, but here I study the floor, too. I love the floor because it is where I can see the world looking up, like a kid. So many textures touch the bottoms of your feet and toes, so I touch it with my whole body. On the floor is where I started to fathom the absurdity of naked bodies and to understand the beauty of my own. I lay naked on the floor of my bedroom inside of mine on the carpet of short-grained and softly fibrous blue that I have walked over since I was a kid. Here I lay with him and pretend that he is the only version of us that still exists, as I wrap the melodies written just for me over my head and let the words penetrate straight through my head. I close my eyes and sit in the windows of these houses that I paint, and I am viewed sleeping in a second story window by many but seen dreaming there by none. I dream of my reflection that I see in the matted clumps of paint that my hands created. And while looking into the heavy green in my eyes, I debate the meaning of my existence and the lessons that the world has yet to explain to me. When I wake, I wash the dried up paint that sticks to my fingers in the warmth of dark shower water that eases my brain’s exhausting painting. Here, my body falls into uncanny positions within the streams that rinses the dirt away from the locks that contest my contentious haircut. A sort of dance that should resemble the figures in the art that I grew to understand. The only way I can describe these moments is that it resembles that rush of sitting by the window seat of a plane that is taking off, and everything below shrinks until the clouds that make the sky a beautiful gray is all you can see. It’s like when geese fly too high in the sky to show up on your skin in bumps, with a delicate chill that vibrates your spine and skull.
Steven Franco — Hi! My name is Steven Franco and I am a current sophomore pursuing a business track. Engaging in the arts has been a relatively recent undertaking of mine, and it has been enjoyable exploring and creating different pieces of writing or visual art. A fun fact about me is that there are two sets of twins in my family, one of which I am a part of.