Chad VanGaalen - "Willow Tree"

"Our lives are of little importance," said Rebecca, to the figure in her favourite painting. The painting is old and has a traditional frame and hangs on her mustard-coloured wall. The figure inside is looking at the artist, at the audience, standing on a windy grassy hill. Rebecca is tall so the picture is hung high, higher even than her eye-level, so the figure looks like it is looking down at the viewer, or over the viewer's head. An obvious position of superiority.

The rain has been non-stop. The whole east coast has had rainy days for three weeks straight. Biking in the rain, even the change in Rebecca's pocket is wet by the time she gets where she's going. The bank, the library, the video store, a potluck, a vernissage, the movies, a date, nothing special.

Rebecca checks her pulse and writes it down. She keeps detailed notes of her anxiety. She is most anxious at night time, when she believes that she hears noises that aren't there, people that aren't there, things that aren't happening. She has trouble sleeping, but takes natural sleep-aids like melatonin. The notes she keeps don't really help the anxiety, they kind of function like making an extremely detailed floor map of your own apartment. Yep, there it is all mapped out, but you could also just look around and see the same thing.

In the margins of her notes, Rebecca is drawing a little story of a rocket ship with arms and legs. It burns off its arms and legs when it tries to fly. On the first sunny day after the rain, it's a Saturday. Rebecca went for a walk to find a garage sale. She brought her favourite painting with her, and she walked in the sun on the sidewalk. She found a garage sale and pretended to look at things until the old couple in the lawn chairs whose stuff it was weren't looking, and she left the painting right there, leaning up against the old bear-shaped dishes and VHS copies of Three to Tango and Money Train.

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