106: Ornamented

She was putting the final Touches to what was meant to be a house warming present for the both of them, if a gift to yourself made by yourself could really be considered a gift at all. Set in a reimagined living room, more spacious, decisive, elevated in matters of taste than current reality could afford, it was a projection of their lives in a future fifty or so years from now, one that she knew they would have to fight for if not claw their way through at times. She detected in her own gaze a certain world weariness that had surprised her when she had come back to the paining one morning. And it had annoyed her that this weariness only appeared in her face and not in Jackson's who wore her easy expression as if she held the leash and the world obeyed her when she barked. Embedding more deeply the lopsided scowl Jackson possessed when talking about the lives of others gave a little payback, and adding to this a loose lock grey undernourished hair and a slightly raised left shoulder that she anticipated developing from her steadfastly sloppy posture, their characters started to push a little more against the mould. The tattoos on Jackson's left arm had to be delicately woven into the sags and wrinkles that seemed to draw them together into a more coherent whole than they actually had: a pencil sharpener, a beer bottle top, a 5 letter hangman with the letters s m u r f all crossed off and no letters correctly entered in the gaps, to name but a few. The tattoos that once seemed charming in the boldness of their random nature now felt impetuous and it wasn't too hard to fill in the other arm with a catalogue of future whims. Now that a few scores were settled, the painting seemed near to completion. But only a few days passed until the nagging feeling of incompleteness took her back to the canvas, where the square seemed nowhere near won. The interior now jarred horribly with the ghosts of their future selves. The clean lines, pastel shades, and minutely manacured shadows cast through hand cut glass had a whiff of pretension about them when set against the eternal Conflict that was Jackson. Not wanting to impose her ideals on a shared vision of the future, she decided to go with something that would be more to Jackson's choosing: an oak lined study with heavily ornamented mantlepiece headed by a guilt framed winter landscape. The weight of the backing was a great relief for it seemed to teather Jackson to the ground and stop her from floating off with the clouds. But it also had the effect of making her own withered body seem somehow translucent and as much as she wished to inhabit this space the smell of old wood and the waft of the feet of forebears was too much to stomach. With a few deft strokes She painted herself out of the picture replacing herself with a cigar burnished buttoned leather armchair occupied by a stuffed cockerel in a glass vitrine.