“On hair falling down in curls.”

This morning, coming into my study, I stopped by the door to look at the drawing hanging on the wall. How many times do I come into this room and never notice it? Hundreds of times. Thousands. But this morning I noticed. Last year, over the Christmas holiday, I was writing a long essay in which this drawing has a little cameo. I was writing an essay about the artist who drew it–me–and how his life and my life entwined for a few years. By the time he drew this, we were “friends”, or at least that’s what I thought. But writing the essay had me re-reading a stack of old letters he’d written to me and I realized he never gave up his obsessive hope that I would realize I should make my life with him.

“On hair falling down in curls.”

Section 389 of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebook.

On hair falling down in curls:
Observe the motion of the surface of the water which resembles that of hair, and has two motions, of which one goes on with the flow of the surface, the other forms the lines of the eddies; thus the water forms eddying whirlpools one part of which are due to the impetus of the principal current and the other to the incidental motion and return flow.

He drew me once with my third child. He drew on rough paper that began to deteriorate almost at once. He made a copy and brought it when he came for a visit. It’s on the wall outside my study and I see it every time I come in to work at my desk. When he brought it I almost forgot the difficult weeks, the letters, the pressure, the insistent pronouncements of love. Look at my strong arms, the drapery of my clothes, the soft curl of my hair down my back, like water in motion. Look at my hands.

I almost forgot.

Hundreds of time a year I pass the drawing. Hundreds of times I come down the stairs from my bedroom to encounter a portrait of myself hanging in the stairwell, myself at 23. The essay began as a conversation with that younger self. I finished it last March and it sits in various forms–paper, pdf, etc.–in my study. It would be difficult to publish it, for some legal reasons, for reasons of length (34,000 words) and subject matter (the male gaze, how it insinuates itself into a life, and how difficult it is to look away), and maybe most of all for personal reasons that involve my own sense of trespass. (It’s complicated.) Writing the essay was troubling and also cathartic.

As the old year fades away in grey light, I am sitting at my desk and thinking, taking stock of the past 12 months: what was accomplished, what was lost, what gave me joy, what didn’t. I wrote this essay, I worked on a novel, Easthope, set near me on the Sechelt Peninsula, I spent time with my family, with a few good friends. I swam in the Pacific Ocean in January on a trip to Baja and I swam daily, from the first of May until mid-October, in the lake near my home. As the old year fades, the lines of the drawing fade a little too. It’s behind glass. When I swim, my hair is water in motion and the years flow around me like water. There was so much I forgot until I wrote it down.