Justin had a dozen or more means by which to measure things.
The thick stick he'd kept on hand to 'measure the true size of a canvas' stood leaning against a long crack on the southwest wall of his squalid workspace. It was a vintage one he'd found at an art studio auction a few years back, bearing the heat-tattooed logo of a store that hadn't existed in decades and a six digit phone number beginning with the letters 'EV'. When he'd first picked it up and felt the heft of its solid, square weight and imagined the paint splattered talent that had, perhaps, wrapped around it's girth, he'd grinned and paid the outrageous price of nine dollars.
He'd invested two weeks worth of Port Authority bus passes on that yardstick, though for years he'd seldom moved it from it's place along the southwest wall. His canvases were all now pre-stretched and pre-sized.
~~~~~~~
On the wall beside a single, deep basin sink hung an old bar thermometer Daphne had found for a dollar at a thrift sale on one of her jaunts to West Chester. The cheeky barmaid that adorned it, with her call of "Free Beer! - Tomorrow" was perfect for him, Daphne had claimed, given his willingness to bare his body for a free glass of the brew at Woody's. He'd laughed and said thank you and placed it on yet another bare nail that had been hammered into the cracked plaster of the spartan room. It had probably been a beautiful cherry red at one time, although the enamel was faded now and chipped, letting the rusted metal show though in places.
He no longer shed his shirt in a bar for a glass of free beer - now bought the cheap bottled kind and drank it alone in the dark - but the thermometer still worked like it was supposed to, telling him the room was most times too cold.
~~~~~~~
On a battered table that balanced against the longer wall of the room, Justin kept an assortment of sketching pencils in a disturbingly precise arrangement. He sometimes imagined he was Courbet or Hopper, or even Klint, as he held out one of the pencils, pretending to use the thing to gauge perspective and scale while roughing out ideas on paper or canvas. Pretending to let it visually measure the imaginary distance between this point and that, here and there. Now and then.
In truth, he most often used a perspective grid these days for more precision, more control, but he kept the pencils around, though they often gave a distorted perception to his work. One that wasn't intentional. For those times when he dared remember that the less precise, less controlled, less intentional was sometimes the best part of art and life.
~~~~~~~
On the back of the door he posted a rotation of calendars - the ones they continued to send him from PIFA, illustrated with the best of the best from the various disciplines of art. He dutifully hung them up the day they arrived, changing them out by year. He'd yet to flip the month on the last one. There really wasn't a need. The days, weeks, months were all the same. A passage of time measured in little individuated numbered squares, a passage that crept along at a snail's pace and flew by too quickly.
Somewhere along the line he'd stopped measuring time by years and months and days and hours and minutes. With calendars and clocks. Stopped measuring by watching the sun and the moon and the way shadows fell across oak hardwood. By the comforting clang of a metal door and the soft hiss of a lowered zipper.
He began measuring time breath by breath. Heartbeat by heartbeat. Brush stroke by brush stroke. He began measuring it in venetian and crimson and vermilion, washed it with a second of raw umber. He began measuring it in unmoved yardsticks and faded thermometers and useless pencil gauges. By the absence of doe-eyed glances and tongue-in-cheek smiles. He began existing - it's only time - instead of living.
~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~
Four years.
Four years taking the measure of himself as a man. It was what he'd needed to do, they'd said. And he'd agreed to it, thought he'd wanted it. Acclaim. Money. Independence. New York. He had them all now, to a degree, but he'd still felt neither successful nor much like a man. It was supposed to make him fly. Instead he felt earth-bound. His great opportunity had evolved into merely a series of unconnected moments. A gallery show here, a missed connection there. A non-marriage relegated now to voicemail. There was an unbalanced weight to it all - an oppressive presence of the city that was supposed to 'make' him, and the hollow loss of the one that already had. A half-pound of 'I've done it!' and a pound and a half of 'what the fuck?'
Some opportunities just don't measure up to the ones abandoned.
~~~~~~~
Justin pressed through the line of bodies, the sway of a duffel slapping against his hip. For the first time in four years he felt weightless. Taller, warmer than he'd been and he could sense the moments begin to string together again. He felt the stiff sheaf of boarding papers in his left hand and the heat of a phone in his right. He glanced at the small screen. It lit up like his own face and he finally felt his whole measure as a success. As a man.
-- he'd texted a while ago.
The one word reply:
