by Heidi Biggs

Sarah Grew, *Cascade*, oil paint, plant material, and encaustic on panel, 18x18 inches, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Candy Dinner

Heidi Biggs | Nov 2023 | Issue 29

I moved. It has been 3.5 weeks and I haven’t shipped my stuff down. It sits in a U-Box in a storage facility somewhere in central Pennsylvania. There are a total of about two new pictures on my phone’s camera roll. I haven’t been listening to music and I walk around caked in a membrane. I’m padded in gauze, stuffed in the tomb of the hard crust of my former life, drying without the wetness of being lived, a protection as leaving was wounding, as I am regrowing new parts, it is a cast. I am in a full body cast for my spirit.

The blueprint was all there, easy to see forming on the day we went running in the woods, then swimming in the pond, then laid in the grass in the sun. Before we ever kissed where my heartache filled the space between us, a space a little too far apart to be more than friends. I wanted to touch your hand, or your arm. I threw grass at you the way teenagers do. And we talked and laughed like there was no unspoken tension. My heartache was the backbone of everything, forever.

We lingered there as long as we dared, pond water drying itchy on my skin. I had a dissertation to write. “Was I hungry?” he asked. Yes. “Want to get food?” Yes. We got tacos. He got six, six tacos. I got two. He is a particularly small man, I’m bigger, and I always said he ate like a snake. We walked to a park a few blocks away carrying the takeout and happened upon a highschool graduation taking place in an adjacent outdoor sports stadium. We sat on a low, stone wall and watched them graduate as we ate. Their caps and gowns were maroon, many bodies building a sea of color gently rolling as they moved around, stood up, sat down. A school marching band was playing. Between taco bites, his taco-lifting hand hung from the wrist over the styrofoam takeout tray so the oil from the tacos dripped down off of his thin bony fingers, rolling over the rings he wore doubled on lower and middle-bone knuckle joints. He didn’t bother to clean his hands till the very end.

He drove me one block to my office. He was sleepy, he said. “Sleep under the tables in my office,” I said, joking. “No,” he said, laughing. When I was with him I never wanted it to end, so feeling bold, I said, “Someday, after my dissertation, let’s stay up all night” so we never had to stop hanging out. But we were trying to be friends after he rebuffed me once so I added, “not romantically” (maybe romantically), I thought, “like how best friends at slumber parties do.” He said, “Yeah!” He said yes. He said yes. And then he said bye, very sweetly, and he drove away without even a hug. Was it too risky? We were stuck in the in-between. I went upstairs to my office and used the shower in the big commuter bathroom to rinse off, the smell of reanimated lake water wafting up in the steam. Then I went back to my desk to keep writing.

One of the last nights before I left, a few months after we kissed and stayed up all night, we drove in the dark to the convenience store to get movie snacks. I don’t really eat much candy, but we got candy and popcorn and soda water and Gatorade. Everything bad. And we tangled up on the couch with the candy and I don’t remember what movie we watched but I felt some kind of hard knot untie like there could be sweet things in this life. Things could be softer. And we could eat candy for dinner and we could stay up all night and we could be in love both like best friends and romantically at the same time. But, maybe that is not right. Maybe that is unsustainable. Maybe there was always a cavity forming on some enamel. It was too much of a good thing, falling apart quickly like sugar in rain.

And then I left. And he stayed. And now I’m here, in my tomb, clutching my skeleton memory of him a little longer. My skeleton. My best friend. My unbridled energy. My shooting star. My giggle fits. My candy dinner. My hope. My new feeling. A softer moment, an unwinding knot, a new way to be. So much yes in contrast to some kind of unyielding no on his part. It made sense, I guess. But also I couldn’t help but think: if only I was a real girl. If only I was. If only I was staying. If only there was some way to solve it.

My heartache was the backbone of everything, forever. Silly me.

Note about the artwork: . “Encaustic” is a method of paint-making/painting where pigment is mixed into a beeswax and resin mixture and then used to paint. After the wax you heat it again to seal and adhere the layers of paint together. The ancient greeks used it to paint their ships as it also seals out water. The oldest encaustic paintings we still have are Egyptian from around 100 BCE.

Heidi Biggs (they/she) is a writer and academic living in Atlanta, GA. They have an interdisciplinary background, holding a B.A. in Literature, MDes in Interaction Design, and PhD in Informatics. They are currently a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology exploring intersections of storytelling, theory, design, and technology in relation to climate change. Their writing and research explores queerness, embodiment, land histories, and ecological entanglements and they believe we need new kinds of stories to imagine new worlds.

Sarah Grew creates art based in painting and photography, that expands into installation and environmental art and contracts into collage and printmaking. Her work includes a range from public art projects to wall based pieces belonging in private collections nationally and internationally. In researching the concepts that enrich her work she has become a beekeeper, studied native plant habitats, and worked as an Artist-in-Residence for a recycling facility in California. Recently, she was an artist in residence on a science research boat studying the effects of climate change on the plankton food web. Previously, Grew was awarded residencies at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Playa Artist Residency, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Joshua Tree National Park, the Collegeum Phaenomonologicum in Italy, Brush Creek and the Ucross Foundation. She has also received several support fellowships from The Ford Family Foundation. Currently, Grew is working on a several of time-bending projects; paintings that examine modes of expressing time through layering visual art technologies from different periods and concurrently, a photography project using early printing methods to speak to climate change and the fragility of our planet.