“Quarantine Diaries,” by David Garyan (Day 39)

Quarantine Diaries – Day 39 April 22nd, 2020

Trento, Italy

Frame of Mind

Sometimes I wonder what gets me out of bed every morning. Whose logic whispers in my ear? The weather will keep changing the same way— there’s nothing new outside, but you must still go. People come in and out of my life, and they do this like transactions in a bank, but I neither save like the elderly, nor withdraw like a gambler. I learn to speak facial expressions from a book, and I do this without looking down at the slang. What slang?

The one etched into wet cement. So have the streets become both familiar and unfamiliar. Instead, I should ask: What thought, in the morning, makes me throw off the covers? What goal, at night, makes me

strong enough to do that again? I want to catch these reflections like hunters without weapons— hunters without weapons coming across the perfect prey. Who, in fact, is the I that I am? Not anyone else.

When do painters become themselves? When they paint an imperfect self-portrait. When do painters become artists?

When they paint a perfect self-portrait. I’m no artist. Yet I've looked in the mirror and drawn 12,000 sketches. But none of them exist— except the one I’m drafting today. Why must faces be famous to deserve histories? Obscurity is an illiterate person trying to write in the past tense.

Why can common people only be acclaimed in the present? It’s not easy to hang what time makes extinct. It's even harder to frame it. Our years are the benches in the busiest museums. So few take a rest there, even fewer for long. We're too busy looking at those who made history. In this trance of esteem our own struggles are lost. We set them outside when they belong in the gallery. But who can admire the canvas when your birth had no primer, or worse yet, was torn from the start.