Momos in Neukölln

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momos in Neukolln Suzanne Forbes April 2016I had a pretty rough day yesterday.

But today when I went to the bank at Hermannplatz, an incredibly handsome man was serving momos from a food truck.

I love Tibetan food second only to Mexican food in the whole food. I am a momo fiend. So when I walked along the sunny, bustling plaza to Momo Master, I was pretty excited. imagine how excited I was when I saw the beautiful man serving them!

Yeah, yeah, I’m shallow. But I’m a portraitist- human beauty is my raison d’être.

I asked if I could draw him and he said yes! It’s perspective drawing crunch time as I develop the teaching materials for my next class, Perspective for Masochists, so I made it a seriously challenging spatial drawing. It was two hours of hard-core angle-gauging to get the truck.

The momo gentleman was wearing the trifecta of boy-hotness clothes: a v-neck sweater over a button-up henley, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and a thin necklace. Guys, you know wearing long sleeves and rolling or pushing them up make you look great, right? And that a necklace is a socially acceptable gender-fluid signifier that is as charming to women as guyliner? Whether it’s a spiritual article, like red thread or a crucifix, or just a strand of beads! With an open-neck shirt, magic.

I don’t mean to be dehumanizing by objectifying this extremely nice total stranger. I don’t know if the female gaze can operate in the theater of the historic male gaze without accruing its toxins. But I know that actually Rob, whose loss hit me again so hard yesterday, and ALL of my husbands have genuinely enjoyed my pure aesthetic delight in male beauty.

My drawing only barely suggests how great-looking this person is, but I did what I could. And the momos were delicious!

Waiting on a lady.

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graffitiresto by Suzanne Forbes April 28 2016I made this drawing while waiting for a lady from my recovery program and feeling a lot of grief and frustration about the inexorability of death.

My boyfriend Rob died thirty years ago, but I still don’t know how to fit his death into the world. Experiencing spring in a place with a New York climate again brings it all back like a freight train.

I found the invite to Ava and Conor’s wedding in my papers yesterday. They were so goddam scintillating. So clever, so beautiful, so young. At least Conor left Finn in the world.

Most of Rob’s art was public, because he was a graffiti artist, and the last of his big pieces disappeared from Soho years ago. I look for his tags in every photo of 80s New York I see, but don’t find them. Kim Basinger walks past one on Spring St. in 9½ Weeks. I dream about walking New York, looking for his pieces.

The longer I’m sober, the safer I am, the more I can experience things; some of those things are really hard.

I came home from the restaurant (which is our neighborhood bistro, called…Graffiti) and just sat and cried for two hours. Just crying, just tears flowing out of me like they had all the time in the world. There is nothing I can do but keep doing, keep trying to do the best I can to be a better person, to make the best art I can, to be the best friend and wife and teacher I can. But Jesus, I miss him.