“I’m a saint, bleeding from my eyes,” I remembered telling him, something I meant at the time even though I made it sound like a joke. Now I hated it. “My skin gets so thin you could break it with a fingernail.” Absurd. I wished that I could take it all back and do none of it over again. This time I would not reach for him in his studio. I would not look him in the eyes. I would not let myself want.

It is so awful to want. I have let myself want so few things, because—the tension of it—I can barely stand it. I let myself want my paintings, when I am making them, and then I force myself to push them away, and that’s—I can barely handle that.

If God is real, then Don’t Let Yourself Want should be the first commandment. Don’t let yourself want anything. Be happy with the life you’ve got. It’s all she’s going to give you.

*  *  *

Purity—and then Obedience—and then frames—and then crates. The closer I got to the end, the more work seemed to appear. As the paintings cured, I would build their frames: custom semi-opaque fiberglass encasements, rather like giant cellphone cases, ones that I liked to ring in bands of brightly colored, rubberized silicone because I preferred the texture of how rubber sits against a wall over the hard gnash of almost any other material.

I couldn’t move any of the paintings myself. The panels, yes—they were only 100 to 150 pounds each—but the whole assembly weighed somewhere between 600 and 700 pounds. Because of their heft, I would need to build a lightweight dummy painting, carve a foam inverse of the frame shape that I wanted, and create a mold from that. Then I’d need to cast seven frames, or more likely eight since I always managed to break one. (This is why you have assistants.) Each of these actions—building the dummy, carving the foam, creating the mold, casting one frame—would take a day or longer. I’d need to rent a hydraulic lift to fit them onto their corresponding paintings. Then—I’d have to build their crates for shipping.