From belly button to bone

“Goedemorgen, Meester.”(1)

“Adelheyd! (2) AA-Del-HHayt, when will you become my Aleida?”(3)

“I brought you peaches, Meester.”

“Hurry, light is unfaithful. Place the basket by your thighs. Pick a different scarf today, would you. The grey one. Peaches... and ashes—”

“Meester, I ran out of ochre, need to pick more oil. Would you be done by noon?”

“Oh, leave your barley fields, Adelhayed! I need you. Here.”

“Meester, I’ve been modelling frequently, lately, I… I do have to catch up—with painting.”

“The Good Lord has gifted you enough, my sweet Aleida. Just be. No need to do. This softness… how the sun caresses the profile. So much to do...so much but the flesh doesn't wait for—”

I was thirteen when Meester Ter Avest (4) visited the walnut trees of my aunt's summer house and offered his mentorship in the fine arts. Planted among oat straw grasses and mustard flowers, I painted my summers away while the majestic spurs of the sea bathed the feet of meadows drunken with wind. Ter Avest came to visit every week, and by the age of eighteen I had become his apprentice and a devoted student. When I didn't mix paints or cleaned brushes, I studied the form and movement of the human body while looking for their counterpart in nature.

“Adelheyd, your hand is so precise, the mood – nostalgic. Where is the color?” He said and placed a hand on my knee, recalling the feeling of vibrancy in his own body.

Although fortunate to find a creative shelter at the edge of the forest, I bore the weight of caring for the undone ropes of a genius mind. With time, my paintings became of less importance to Ter Avest while he focused on the obsession to depict the light in the human body. I modelled - his brush devoured the contours and sniffed the last drops of verve from my skin.

Ter Avest, almost eighty, maddened to depict the spark of life, was a tough nut to break. His glow had smudged and blistered like the edges of paint on his palette.

One summer, I had gone to help my aunt with the walnut oil extraction when the nightmares begun. I received a letter from Meester begging me to return back to Amsterdam. His health deteriorated.

I left my works, packed the brushes and departed on the next day. I found him laying by the dresser and the pigment cabinet, unaware of his own body, cheek drowned in a pool of saliva.

“The butterfly – Hunab Ku. She flaps her wings once and universes are born.”

“Meester, meester. What has taken you?”

It wasn't a stoke, the doctor said. Another doctor came...and we called it “the condition.”

Was it the condition that made Ter Avest less invested in mentoring and more interested in patronize me as an object. I did not know. Meester soon returned to painting. Two beaten stumps, his legs had tripped on the fleeting fibres of life and planted soles sternly growing down. His roots, utterly fixated onto a mind of extraction, sipped the morning dew to only discover thirst sleeping in the curves of their checked mouths.

“Rest, gentle Adelheyd. Rest by the bench. Let the light of your young beauty dye my brush.” I rested, so did my craft. A prisoner of devotion - I became the altar of sacrifice, feeding the trembling veins of the dagger. Ter Avest's obsession grew to a rage when he couldn't paint. The condition brought more cognitive impairment, seizures and lack of muscle coordination. In the moment when Meester wasn't delusional he leaned on his brush like a crutch, propping alive the idea of his anima.

“Butterflies everywhere!” Ter Avest's visions, unbearable to hold, ate through his mind. When he refused any kind of help from his servants, I was the only mortal inhabitant of the abyss in care for his needs. I moved in. His brain cells had been dividing in a butterfly shaped tumour which caused severe abnormalities. Unable to stand and hold the brush, Ter Avest lost sight but gained an awareness into another reality. He refused to take any food by mouth. His skin outgrew the bones and sat on him like a blanket. Holding the freshly picked peaches with the bony cradle of his palm sustained his existence in the earth's gravity.

One Sunday, he chased me away, enraged, drilling a long index finger in the air above his head.

“Moon's core is cooling down. Leave now, unfaithful heart. Leave me. Go!”

I ran down the stairway, fulminating through the front door a ball of anguish, pain and despair bounced inside my throat. The market opened its mouth heavy with noise and gargled me down along with men in dock tinted clothes. They yelled, whistled and unloaded baskets full of fish. Women carried around their pristine bubbles of propriety insulted by the touch of mischievous thieves.

On the way back I tripped and dropped the peaches. They burst open onto the cobble stone, exposing kernels ripped from the flesh like half broken moons. The light in Meester Ter Avest studio had returned - soft, full and tender. His unclothed body - had coiled around the centre of its temporal universe - the belly button. A colony of butterflies, breathing, hovered over with diligence to extract the last sip of nectar – the soul. Disposed of the skin - a compostable mortal dress, the crystal bubble of his soul triumphed away, carried by a million of tubular mouths.

In the bare form of a fetus one arrives and departs, leaving behind what's in between. The sole essence of existence - the heart, a half broken moon with a slowly cooling core remains.

In honor of my beloved grandfather who had lived an honourable life and created a patriarchal legacy in all of its tragedy and triumph.

In honor of the master and the muse who historically have been severed by patriarchy, gender, class, function and scopophilia. Many contemporary attempts to reclaim that union have solely rolled the trenches of victimhood over the royalties of female power and dignity. To all that, I coil my clay humbly knowing that master and muse are one.