Floating like Toulouse-Lautrec

I remember, as a youngster, seeing an oil on cardboard sketch by Toulouse-Lautrec. It was of a red-haired woman lying across a bed with her black-stockinged legs dangling over the side. The contours of her body sinking into the white of her slip and the sheets. Like slipping between a daydream and sleep. I felt I was she, not someone looking at her - alone - as it is so named. I have only ever seen Alone (1896) in reproduction. I bought the postcard on my first trip to Paris. I kept the postcard for years and wherever I lived I would pin it to a wall near my desk so that it was always close. I felt a tenderness toward this image, like the tenderness one feels toward a photograph of oneself as a child. Somewhere along the way I lost the postcard. Yesterday I spotted a monograph of Toulouse-Lautrec at the hair salon where I had gone to get my hair cut. I sat slowly turning the pages of the book as my hair fell like threads on the images. There she lay, on white sheets. Sketches and paintings and posters and prints. The dancers, the hookers, the singers and drinkers, in dancehalls and bedrooms. And even a portrait of Van Gogh. I didn't know. I got dizzy. Monsieur Lautrec had got me drunk, floating on the music and perfume and dancing. And day dreaming of you, the child inside who had never left. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, there you are, floating in the Atlantic near Bordeaux in 1899, two years before your death at 37.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alone 40 x 31cm, oil on cardboard 1896