Golden Fingers

I swear I was going to work today but when a girlfriend called me and asked if I'd like to run errands with her the devil in me couldn't say no.
After she treated me to an awesome lunch and we had checked out my show we went to the hardware store (you know that's one of my favourite places to be) and then headed back to her house to do some plumbing.
We needed to replace the faucet on her kitchen sink which involved trying to unscrew some pretty stubborn bolts in awkward places under the basin. Without the right tools (and with our big, gigantic girl muscles) we managed to strip one of the bolts almost bare. I looked down after touching the bolt (to see if it had loosened) to find my fingers covered in gold specks.
My hands were a little raw and red and the gold was sparkling all over them.
It made me think of how when Frida Kahlo was ripped in two the gold leaf from a nearby painter sprinkled all over her. I always found that so beautiful.
Can you imagine that? A young girl torn in two, her body just a mass of blood and bone, and then golden hail sprinkling and bathing her completely?
I would have loved to have seen that.
Anyway she wasn't a painter before the accident, she became one after.
They say - obviously - it's because she had nothing else to do while she was healing and that it became a way to express her pain.
But I prefer to believe that she absorbed something in that golden rain, something from outside of herself, something from outside of everything. How could she not have absorbed anything from it?
And today when I saw the golden flakes on my skin, these little bits of metal, I fought temptation to press them further into my fingers. I resisted the temptation to absorb them into my blood.
And it's just as well, too.
Because...you know.
Then I'd probably become a plumber. ;)