Unlearning

by Wren Aubrey Latham

I’m not— okay, I’m not not saying thank you. If you need me to say thank you, I will, but I don’t think my gratitude or lack thereof is the issue here. You're saying I don’t think I’m talented. Which is, like, categorically false. I could lay my accolades out, my acknowledgments and shit, and it would take hours. Hours. I don't mean to chew you out, but . . .

This one's a postmodern piece, with influences of naturalism, and a little bit of arte povera, outsider art type stuff— see? Whole thing's dusted with coffee grounds, charcoal, turmeric, garden soil, paprika, so it'd have an element of smell, this earthy, ashy thing I was going for. I built the main structure pretty quickly, then the chain wall, the stairs, and I secured them with little dots of glue, so that when I moved, everything got just a little wonky. It was for our final project and Calhoun— this tight-lipped hardass —Calhoun had told us to go all out, so I wanted to show a progression of a world slowly broken down by outside forces. And the class seemed to dig it, especially with the before-and-afters in my presentation, and when I explained that the actors would be walking onto a different set each time, but then . . . Calhoun laughed. Hard. He laughed, like he was mad at me, and told me that, for my final project, I'd taken a shit of arts-and-crafts and baking supplies and turned it in.

Everyone was floored because he never gives in-class critiques, only on paper. I mean, the guy was so disturbed by my interpretation of an open-ended assignment that he laughed. In my face. So I dropped it. Got a nasty knick on my ankle from a stray splinter, too.

I stopped going to class. Failed out in the last three weeks, blocked all of Calhoun's emails. People kept coming up to me, saying they thought it was part of a performance, which . . . that's its own thing. So it'll sit in this storage unit until I figure out what to do with it. I can't get myself to throw it away, because I know what it took, and I know what it looked like before. And now it's a pile of rubble, like I intended.