I woke up Saturday morning with not much motivation to do anything. I was alone, the house empty, quiet looming. I lay in bed looking at my desk, the one I usually collage at, and knew I had neglected that need in me. Still not feeling much of anything, I got up to sit at it. Maybe flipping through pages of a magazine would reawaken my creative muscle memory, I thought.

Despite not liking it, the theme of death came up as I looked through The New Yorker. I saw the image of a cartoon cemetery and read its title as “Dead by the Pool” as opposed to “Dread at the Pool.” I took my misreading as symbol for what I was truly feeling—not alive but dead, or at least some form of it.

I, however, knew that I did not feel “dead” but “ded”—a deliberate and almost comedic misspelling of the term originally meant to bring about dread. There’s a difference.

My blackout poem isn’t too significant other than that the message combats the deadness in the artwork itself:

Friend, you chose to live. You did.

Hurt was set aside, called by love.

I replaced the poem’s original title with “Inside Story” since the story inside, or behind, this artwork is found on the page next to it. The collage background was made by painting the page with inexpensive acrylic paint and taking the back of my brush to draw in squiggles while the paint was still fresh.

And throughout this whole process I could not help but think of Adriene and her yoga for those who feel dead inside: