I have glasses with thick coke bottle lenses. Sometimes I go without correction and see the world blurry, freely. This habit might contribute to why I enjoy practicing visual arts-- I like to play with how the world doesn’t look. You encourage what I enjoy, Mom, so I keep you updated about my art.

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​A classmate said "your art looks like yours." She had seen a handful of flat paintings, but this comment was made at a sculpture. I was putting the finishing touches on The Thing. It’s ten feet long, suspended, globular, gaping, brightly colored, and fuzzy. Five hundred straight pins stuck into squares of snipped stuffed animal skins arranged on chicken wire.

Since installing The Thing in the student gallery slash art building lobby, I’ve gotten questions with a certain undertone of asking. Eviscerating stuffed animals, I’ve discovered, returns a kind of asking that assumes I’m disturbed. Whatever the inquiry, I respond with what I know was consistently true throughout the process of the thing’s creation: I wanted to make something beautiful.

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To make something beautiful was what I knew among the mounds of bedroom viscera. Intimate, inanimate play things. The other thoughts were strangled. Only: Make Beauty.

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    Those questions about my process made me realize, Mom, that I had another truth besides my search for something beautiful: You were there the whole time. You, when I pawed through the bins of discarded toys; you, at my table when I upended the suffocating bags; you, watching the softbody tumble of bears, dogs, and rabbits; you, the surgical scissors in the first plush belly; you, the wintry afternoon; you, the heads in a heap. You, snip, you, sweep, you, shape, you pin, you sneeze, you, adjust, you, done.

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“It’s beautiful,” I thought.
    “It’s beautiful,” someone said and someone said and someone said. I wonder if they too thought it uncomfortable to voice how the thing was also horrible.

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Maybe this is why I stuck to my response about beauty to the inquiries that came with the compliments. I didn’t include you. There wouldn’t be enough time to explain that yes, you were there as I made the thing. You were there as I was hating, and you were the ribs to kick as I repeatedly stuck my hand inside the tubes of limbs to grab a fist of fluff and pull it out. “It’s almost too much,” I spat, “Too much, Mom, to remember, to think, and why is it beautiful, Mom, why, Mom?”

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You can’t answer this, and you don’t have an analgesic nonanswer. You have love to dissipate hate, and Why matters less and less.