Las Palmas by Tricia Lawless Murray
“I ask him if it’s unusual to be sad, as we are. He says it’s because we’ve made love in the daytime, with the heat at its height. He says it’s always terrible after. He smiles. Says, whether people love one another or not, it’s always terrible. Says it will pass as soon as it gets dark. I say he’s wrong, it’s not just because it was in the daytime, I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. Today I tell him it’s a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life. I say I don’t quite understand what she says, but I know this room is what I was expecting. I speak without waiting for an answer.”
This quote from The Lover, a novel by the French writer Marguerite Duras, provides a context for the work I did while spending one week in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria two months ago.
Tricia Lawless Murray is a Los Angeles, CA based artist.
To view more of Tricia's work, please visit her website
