He gestured toward the painting again, this time with a kind of reverence.
“The bestial object of the northern sea. The first and only one in my eyes. I could not tell what exactly she was, and she did not seem certain of me either.
I think I myself may have been the first and only hominid object of the northern sea.”
He told me that this encounter inspired him to keep moving forward, that he began to see that same kind of beauty in everything. He realized he could make art to preserve those moments, to give them permanence where memory might fail.
While he had traded away most of his paintings over the years, this one would always remain. It was his way of remembering her in case one summer, when he returned to the arctic sea, she would no longer be there.
I shared my pemmican with Icecream, who insisted that I take something in return. He offered me a few items he considered culturally significant, including a small woven basket made by a stranger, and his own handmade art print. I’ll try to keep them on my person so that they can be preserved in Paradise as a part of art history.
He explained that he makes paper from dead fibrous plants and carves wooden stamps to reproduce the same image many times. It was a skill, he said, that he had learned from one of the very predators he once sought to be destroyed by. Returning to the same spot every year to see his muse, he’d made towering companions who were prolific in art.
Settling down for the night, I find I can see just well enough in the dark to write. I have taken out my sleeping bag and will be resting soon, though my head is full of thoughts about what love and life are meant to be, and what I might attain in mine.