Strings Attached

Weeping Women

57 Weeping Women Picasso dipped his brush in their tears— long, deliberate strokes saturated with salt, agony. I walked around with boxes of Kleenex, reams of toilet paper. Told anyone who would listen that you left me. They could not paint their misery and so they wrote about it, pens weeping the blue ink of loss. I wasn’t embarrassed by my tears. I told a salesman, confided in strangers, people in bookstores, where I’d sit in the self-help section for hours. They wrote how their bodies emptied became mere outlines, white doves with hearts dangling from their beaks. I fell asleep holding books that might help me hate you. The waitress in the Chinese restaurant who didn’t speak English, understood. Colleagues came to accept the wail and hum, the sounds my body made to let me know I was still alive. They wrote how he abandoned one for another—how he wanted Dora to watch him tell his new love Françoise that she was his most beautiful muse. The rain of grief continued to fall, I feared I would drown. 58 He painted their teeth sharp and jagged, their broken hunger. But I loved the part of me without defenses that didn’t think of humiliation or fashion, the hunter who’d lick the salt of every animal to find the taste of you again. ...