Confessions of a Life Pickpocket

Memory, emotion, time - must we steal it all to make art?

Apr 23, 2024

Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈

Memory, forgive me.

On the crowded avenues and packed subway cars of my overworked brain, somewhere between the puffy-coated hippocampus and tote-shouldered amygdala, I slipped my hand between the fabric of your innocence to plunder. To filch. To cop. To root around in amongst the lost pen caps and hair ties of your existence.

A touch, a smudge against, and out of the darkness came the keepsakes of your records room. The distractions and diversions—a switch of eye-line and accidental bodily contact to direct your attention away from the solid lines and colored in sketches of a childhood, a friendship, two siblings in a car fighting for space—all to retrieve glorious treasures from the archive.

Treasures I could resell on the open market.

Forgive me.

From you, Memory, I have stolen willingly and without mercy. Pathways of thought littered with your precious moments were easily strolled and looted, my hands gliding into the pockets of your tenderness and love, your viciously remembered pain, your truthfully stored injustices, and that one time you rose above that thing to emerge victorious.

Into the lint and crumbs and forgotten receipts of every pocket I went. I go. I pillage.

First the theft, then the hawking of you. The alterations for my art—of telling you not as you were but how I wanted you to be. The edges of your truth are altered and blurred in this crime. In breaking down each memory for parts and selling off the scraps, nothing is sacred. Nothing is safe from the rewrite.

I tell you as I tell you and in the telling of am forever guilty.

My touch leaves no fingerprints, occurring as it does on the daily—quickly, softly, and with incomprehensible tenderness. You are aware of this crime. Even in this knowledge of my pickpocketing ways, you continue to enter crowded spaces, bumping into me with a shove and an open-coated flow.

Victim blaming. Classic.

Back and on my memory mark, day after day, ready set, tap and go. I have been relentless in my crimes, fanning at the cloak of you, tapping at the sense of shapes and conversations and skinned knees.

Everything—and everyone—was and is up for grabs. Family: stolen. Friends: stolen. Fragmented conversations of strangers waiting in line at the grocery store: Stolen.

Used.

Abused.

Memory. I make you unreliable with my words, scribbled in the margins and saved for later. Yours is the easiest pocket. Thank you. I loot. I steal and steal and steal. For my imagination. For my sanity. For my art.

Try as you might—and you don’t—you cannot bury yourself deeply enough. There is no bottomless pocket. My arms are long and my appetite for the crime is insatiable. I will not stop. I will never stop.

I will rifle through the pockets and coats and fabrics and draped memories for as long as we both shall live.

What did you expect? I am a writer. It is my job to pick pockets.

Time, forgive me.

The minutes seemed small. Minuscule, really. The seconds, I figured they’d go unnoticed. You are so endless, Time, sprawling as you do across the chaise lounge of the universe, and here’s me, my end unspecified but 100% guaranteed.

Jealous. Seething. I continually plot to pluck more of you from the breast pocket of the cosmos and alarmingly, from my own timeline.

More. I need more.

In the quiet moments of our togetherness, I slip my thumb under the catch upon this delicate wrist and flip the timepiece into a nearby satchel. The concept of forever will be mine. I ignore all the signs. The urge and pull of you, Time. Your manifest is understood—to right yourself and not be split.

Knowledge is not compliance. Anything that can be measured can be split.

They say you cannot stockpile Time, but you can sure pick its pocket. The security cameras are constantly catching footage of me gathering up the snatches of you, stolen from meetings ended early and errands ignored to be stored in my mason jars of bonus. Of extra. Of more. From all the zones of life.

Forgive me my constant thievery, mostly from the dull drudgery of life—the vacuuming, the mail run, the hanging out at laundromats, watching you dribble away as I use you poorly.

In my crime, I have always endeavored to find you a better life. Your ticks and tocks keep coming, muffled, and muted against the wrist and sleeve of my purpose. Ever expanding.

I have kept them. I am forever keeping time.

Brushing against you in the daylight and dark, I remove your dangling fob. Seconds swing from your chain as I eat the fresh and stolen moments as candy from a string. Leftovers are refrigerated and kept for later. I do not share. This stolen time is mine, all mine.

Towels overflow in hampers. Rents are posted late. Friends puzzle at no-shows as I reallocate time. My zucchinis turn to liquid in the crisper—the compost bin rejoices.

The beguiling wrists of work and life and play call to me and with deft precision I lift time from one to give to another. I ignore the machinations of the mundane to focus on the dream. Out on bail, the ticking is loud as I confidently touch the arm of it, slipping each timepiece off with subtle craft.

Fast, soft, gentle. I pocket this and that and feel the weight of time fill the sack on my back.

The constant whispers of “No time, no time, no time” are urgent in my ear as I stand on the platform, anxious to evade the authorities looking to collar me. To force me into the regular timeline. The 9 to 5. The path from birth to death with all expected checkpoints along the way.

Crime pays. But you don’t know who it’s paying until you check the hourglass.

My mind spins out of frame to find more sand.

We mark time with a hand.

I am the mark. This is my hand. This is the clock I watch.

Emotion, forgive me.

I checked your directory and entered every room you ever thought to hide in. Love, joy, anger, jealousy, greed. All the gooey and ugly and confusing workings attributed to the heart and head. Pride once got an upgrade, and I stole that too. Touching a shoulder, a hip, the center of my back, testing and probing with a restless energy, I stole and stole and stole.

I steal, I steal, I steal.

The dip, when it comes, is sly and precise. Every time. In. Out. There goes that grief—stolen and used as fodder for something no one will read.

Anger, its shape outlined in the back pocket of my jeans, was powerless against my raid. My thieving hand lifted the sensation for a story filled with rage.

Pilfering the pockets of you—of my own failings and triumphs. Relentless and swelling. Sleight of mind. Sleight and ever so slight again.

You did not feel it because it has already been felt.

A love, vulnerable and soft and helpless. I reached right on in and stole the joy of it, the grief of its loss, the sensation of its touch and packed that feeling into a travel case. Tight and firm, like ice cream into a waffle cone.

I’ll eat that later.

Hate was so loud and brassy and challenged me—dared me—to try some magical theatre of distraction. Once I had harvested the essence of its energy, drained the hate of its words and channeled them for my work, hate grew smaller inside of me to be reborn and exploited outside of me, as art. Released and free, it wanders on.

I’m keeping an eye on you.

The misdirection of deflection and intention and inattention and prevention and oh, Ego. Feel my fingers on your neck. Dexterity digits with knuckles cracked and never felt in the moment of the lift and the mark of failure on the forehead of my mind. I snap my fingers and it looks away as I palm the last vestiges of humility from the pants pocket of my ego.

My intent to steal is hidden because my intent is not just to steal, but to mine the emotional fields of your heart and use them in my art. My emotion coat is both buttoned and unbuttoned. It lifts and airs and fans and there you are at the hem and the pocket, and I tap it and out it comes. Here is your art. The art I made from you.

Emotion, forgive me. Give me.

There goes the color and the tone, and the gallery of your brain left out for the world to judge. Which I stole from you. You wore jealousy as a necktie, and I loosened to free you from that noose and repurposed it as a poem.

Fear shivered in the pants pockets of my confidence, and I tugged at it in a crowded moment of anxiety to reset it in a song for the taking.

Even the pocket of envy was powerless against me. Cold and slippery, I tapped and typed away at the shell of it, turning it from a debilitating affliction to a nice piece of fiction.

Memory, time, emotion, circumstance—all art is theft. We are forever reaching into our own pockets, slipping burdens from our psyches and turning the intangible into the physical. Forever feeling the wrists of experience and landscape to file it away in the paints and notes and words of our output.

It’s all theft and we are all pickpockets. We fool ourselves with constant validation, thinking ourselves natural and talented and geniuses. It all comes from somewhere.

We are robbers and thieves, pulling out wallets and watches to pair them up with the inflection of our voice from a far-off room. Tripwires everywhere but the compulsion overwhelming. And so, we pickpocket.

A gentle tug at the corner of an idea, nestled in the folds of a memory, an emotion, in the fabric of time, smiling with teeth naked and lips thin as we maintain eye contact and slip our mitts into the mire of life.

Forgive me.

When I am caught, I shall plead guilty, but until then, I mark the mark of myself.

I pick my own pockets with ravenous appetite.

Me.

Mine.

All mine.

Thank you for reading The Stream. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Behind the Streams, Ep. 52: "Pickpocket"

Janeen McCrae

Apr 28

Behind the Streams, Ep. 52: "Pickpocket"

Read full story

This week’s amends…

"It doesn't occur to many viewers that the artist often has difficulty accepting the painting himself. You can't assume that I gloried in it, or celebrated it. I didn't. I'm a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over. I know I won't remember detail, but I will remember the feeling of the whole thing. I come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in to see what happened the night before. And the feeling is one of, 'My God, did I do that?' That is about the only measure I have. The kind of shaking, trembling of...'That's me? I did that?'"
- Philip Guston