| February 15, 2026| Nonfiction, Print Issues

Soft Grids, Long Distance

Julia Talen
We were listening to Japanese Breakfast on repeat. The road was flanked with snow-dusted prairie grass and the sky was the color of cornflowers. Her right hand was soft but callused at the edges, a simple silver ring on her middle finger. I’d taken a ring of my own and slid it on my middle finger after I left Denver the summer we met. We didn’t live in the same place. I was in Michigan working on my MFA and my girlfriend lived in Denver, working as a plant scientist. We’d planned to travel to Taos for my spring break a few months before–it would be our first trip together.
Agnes Martin, an artist with her own gallery in Taos’s Harwood Museum of Art, painted her first grid after thinking deeply of a tree. She recalled, [in italics] I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.
I’d only recently learned more about her paintings before traveling to New Mexico. I read a short story in the New Yorker years before titled “Javi” by Han Ong and became intrigued by the old reclusive painter in the story. I spoke with my friend, Joanne, an 80-something-year-old woman who had been a docent in art museums across the country. She said that Han Ong based the old woman character off Agnes Martin, the woman who drew minimalistic grids. I looked her up later that same evening and drew a grid on the pad of paper next to my computer. I thought about tic-tac-toe. My boyfriend at the time came behind me and kissed my neck, telling me it was time to leave for his best friend’s birthday party. Many nights in Michigan, I wondered if I was meant to be with Elise. We were long distance and she was the first woman I’d ever been with. I’d told my family about her, and they never asked me questions about her or us. I often thought that it might be easier to meet a man. Perhaps that would appease others and quiet the internalized homophobia that ping-ponged throughout my body.
But Elise’s presence was like nothing I’d felt before in a relationship. She was so gentle and warm. She often wanted to hold me. She called me her plum and cooked me eggs in the morning. She sent me care packages and bought me flowers. She told me I was beautiful when I cried and cried because I felt uncomfortable in the folds of my body. She listened and waited until I finished speaking before sharing back. When we made love, I felt seen and softened. In her Subaru, it was nice to traverse distance together. So often it was one of us traveling 1,000 miles to see the other, alone in two different stale planes, alone in the linoleum bellies of the O’Hare Airport. But here, we had 250 miles in the same vehicle, together. We shared gummy bears and grapefruit seltzers. She often reached for my hand to hold, to kiss. At the same time it felt comforting to traverse distance together, it also felt serious. Couples who took trips together were serious. In an interview with Deborah Triesman, Ong shared that he was enamored by Martin’s text, “Writings/Schriften.” He quotes from the text in the interview saying, Among the many aphoristic sayings in the book, there is one that I remember to this day: “We are born as nouns and not as verbs.”
On our way to Taos, we stopped at Valley View Hot Springs, near Crestone. The only other hot spring I’d been to was off I-70 on the way to Crested Butte with that same boyfriend. He’d argued extensively with the receptionist for lying to him about the cost of pool access. I wanted to break up with him then, but didn’t. He was the first boyfriend I had that stuck around for over a year. Valley View Hot Springs was clothing optional. After trying a few pools that were too shallow or too crowded, we trekked topless and half-clothed in the bright snow to the Top Pond. Three naked men were soaking in the corner, so we put our bras back on and settled into a corner of the steaming pond, avoiding eye contact with the strangers. Bits of algae and sediment floated over our skin. Steam billowed between our lips. Amidst the algae was a small oak leaf, water-worn thin. When held up to the sun, the leaf made shadows on our arms. Its veins reminded me of my grandmother’s sunken hands. I asked Elise what she thought the oak leaf was trying to tell us, because whenever we pushed it away in the water, it swam back towards us. She said it wanted us to pay attention to our surroundings. In the late sixties, Agnes Martin moved to New Mexico after a stint in New York City. She packed up her studio materials into a pick-up truck and drove through Canada and parts of western U.S. before finding a new home in New Mexico. She spent 18 months on the road, spending nights in snow forest camps, working odd jobs. During this time, she wrote, I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years.
After the hot springs, Elise and I continued our drive to Taos. We planned to stay in the first earthship built in the area, a relatively cheap Airbnb just outside of the city. We took showers that used gray water to grow the earthship’s greenhouse garden. After washing my body, I dressed and made tea while Elise bathed. I gazed out the kitchen’s window. Taos. Dusty and open. Wrapped in a towel, Elise walked past me and opened her suitcase to find a change of clothes. I still couldn’t help but envy my girlfriend’s small body. My therapist told me it was dehumanizing to obsess so much about how I was taller and that my hips were wider than Elise’s, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d only been with men, and being the smaller one was what fit. Not only was I falling in love with Elise, but my envy for her body grew too. I was in my 30s. I was out. I thought I was past this. I was confused about how to be with a woman and not compare myself to her. We got dressed and I vomited comments about how ugly I was compared to her. Elise told me to please stop. Then we googled a brewery and went for beers.
Agnes Martin wouldn’t identify as a lesbian, though she shared she had two women lovers and was rumored to have more. She also resisted the label “woman,” famously having stated, “I’m not a woman; I’m a doorknob.” Her life of intense focus and solitude made turning her back from labels easier, but her turn away from identifying as something other than an artist made me question the lists of labels I meander through each day–bisexual, gender nonconforming, femme, writer, teacher.
After the brewery, we drank more beers and ate enchiladas. I hadn’t eaten all day and shoveled beans and cheese into my mouth, searching for the surface of the plate. I felt my skin touch. I felt sick. Elise smiled, and I tried to keep everything I still hated about my body inside. 3x10 grid, empty We talked about moving to Taos. When we left the restaurant, dusk had cooled everything down. A handful of faint constellations netted the sky. We returned to the earthship and held each other close. A neighbor’s dog howled in the distance. Wind blew.
I find the label and the human to slip in and around each other, hovering, like the watery paint of a Martin series. I believe humans to be nouns and verbs. Martin does not classify her paintings as spiritual or oracular, though she practiced Buddhism. Instead, she considered herself to be one of the last abstract expressionist painters, because there was emotion behind the work. In her youth, she was a swimmer and loved to race. When I came to her gallery in Taos, at first, I saw pool lanes.
Next to Elise that night, I dreamt of my parents’ blue and green eyes filling with water and growing over their faces. I dreamt of being a maid of honor and throwing the cake off a cliff. I dreamt of the summer I had bed bugs. I awoke soaked in sweat.
The Harwood Museum of Art is located in the center of the town, comprised of two floors within an adobe structure. Like much of Taos’s architecture, the burnt orange adobe kindles the blue above. The museum is unassuming compared to the Denver Art Museum or the MoMA or the Detroit Institute of the Art, museums I’d become more familiar with over the years. Visitors enter through the gift shop. The ceilings are low. The floors creak. When Alex and I visited that next day, in February, the galleries were almost empty.
*top half of an octagon* Agnes Martin claims to remember the moment she was born. She believes this is possible. As she shares this, her lips purse and frown. I consider the birthings that precede me.
People compare this gallery to the Matisse Chapel or the Rothko Chapel. Each of the seven paintings contain variations on faint teal blue and white rectangles drawn across 5x5 canvases. Viewers enter through the eighth wall of the room and sit under a skylight on bright yellow stools designed specifically for the gallery viewing. One painting hangs on each of the seven walls, and it’s impossible to sit and see them all at once. *in a box* Agnes Martin died in December 2004. I was 13, graphing slopes and intercepts in algebra. Martin’s ashes were spread around the outskirts of the Harwood Museum.
I sat down to face each painting. I could feel Martin’s ghost looking down through the skylight and hovering between the edges of each canvas. I could hear stillness. The paintings were Santorini. They were the echo of an ocean. They were swim practice in fourth grade. Winter sky. Pinstripes. Sonatas. Smoke. *2 by 9 grid*
Time passed. Elise sat next to me. We stared in silence. The blue was soft, the paintings looked like reflections in a window. For a moment I forgot my body and Elise’s. We looked together. Two doorknobs on a bench. The canvases were titled: Untitled (Lovely Life) Untitled (Perfect Day) Untitled (Innocence) Untitled (Friendship) Untitled (Love) Untitled (Playing) Untitled (Ordinary Happiness).

Julia Kooi Talen is an essayist and poet based in the midwest where she teaches creative writing and composition. Currently a PhD candidate in creative writing, Talen lives with their cat, Otis and holds an MFA in creative writing from Northern Michigan University as well as an MSW from the University of Denver.

Last modified: February 9, 2026

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