I gnawed on my bottom lip while I moved my glass and cell phone to my office. Well, office-ish space. I’d intended to set up the second bedroom with a desk, bookshelves, and if I was feeling frisky, a fern. Instead, I kept my laptop on my coffee table, my work odds and ends in a drawer in the kitchen and my books in waist-high stacks next to my bed.
In this room I’d covered the floor with old sheets and propped an easel perpendicular to the windows. The small walk-in closet was filled with canvases of every size—some fresh, some finished, a few were somewhere in between.
I had moved a folding table in here that I’d snagged at a garage sale in my parents’ neighborhood. I’d covered it in another sheet and used it to organize my paints, brushes and other odds and ends. The adjoining bathroom had been turned into a drying room—more cleaned brushes were laid out on every available surface.
Vera called it my studio. But for me, it felt more like a guilty pleasure. An embarrassing hobby that sometimes cured boredom, sometimes became an outlet for frustration and disappointment, and sometimes was more important to me than breathing.
But it wasn’t anything more than that. Once upon a time, I’d had an adolescent dream of becoming a world-famous painter, spending my days hovering over canvas, wielding a paintbrush and my soul as inspiration. But that was before I’d come to terms with necessary evils like bill-paying, car-owning, and meal-planning. I was a real grown-up now with a real, grown-up job. A job that I sometimes even liked. The whole starving-artist thing just wasn’t practical.
I’d indulged my creative side throughout high school, and then done what most other artists did after graduation. I found a job in a loosely creative field and walked away from all of the other impractical daydreams that wouldn’t offer stability or consistent paychecks or a 401k.
But on days like today, when I was reminded of how bad adulthood tasted and how desperately I wished I could run back to my younger years when I didn’t have to pay bills or live alone or wonder what men like Ezra Baptiste were really thinking, I quietly escaped to this sacred place and poured out all of these irrational, conflicting thoughts onto stark, white, glorious canvas. In essence, I stopped thinking altogether.
My landlord had tried to sell me on a roommate when I first moved in, but the thought of dealing with another person day in and day out sounded exhausting. And when I’d leased this place, Vera had still been in Charlotte. She was the only human I could imagine sharing a living space with for longer than three days.
But now she had Killian for that.
Their relationship was another current event that turned funny in my gut. I was so happy for my friend. Like beyond happy. Like maxed out with happiness. Vera deserved every single second of bliss and marriage and happily ever after. She had been through absolute hell with Derrek, and Killian was so perfect for her in every way. They were #relationshipgoals to the extreme. See that proper use of a hashtag? Suck it Green City Mowing.
So why did I feel left behind?
I pulled a hair tie off my wrist and piled my long mane of nearly black hair onto the top of my head. Fiddling with my bangs until they were out of my way, I stripped out of work clothes and threw on the oversized t-shirt a past boyfriend from college had never claimed. Not that I’d offered to give it back.
There were zero lingering feelings for Brady… Brady… Brady-something. But his high school football t-shirt was large and super comfortable and something I was unwilling to part with.
I went about preparing my paints and setting up a fresh canvas on the easel, replacing the latest portrait I’d been working on. I had been in the middle of a winter sunset. Pinks, oranges, and deep purples streaked across a sky filled with thin gray clouds. The sun was an orange globe over a downtown Durham dusted with layers of white snow that had never actually fallen this year. Windows glowed in yellow light and the streets below were… still a work in progress.
I had plans to finish the piece, adding people and vehicles and all the little details I loved about my city. My fingers itched to deepen the sun, blur the edges and streak the pastels with richer color. But I didn’t have a sunset in me tonight. It was cold outside, but there was no snow and my thoughts were wild and disorganized and I didn’t want to paint something beautiful.
I needed raw and vulnerable and confused.
I needed to unleash these erratic emotions and turn them into something I could see, fix, and then abandon.
My fingers trembled as I picked up my brush, so I gripped it harder, digging the end of it into my palm. Sitting down on the very edge of my stool, I gave up fighting internal battles and turned them over to the canvas. It was more than cathartic. It was healing and thinking and soothing all at the same time.
I threw myself into the art of creating something without even having a fully conceptualized idea of what I was going to paint. I just let the day press in on me, crushing me beneath the weight of everything I was so unsure about until it came oozing out my fingers, spilling onto the canvas in purposeful brush strokes and arcs of color.
When I was forced to sit up straight again to give my aching neck and shoulders a break, I realized two and a half hours had passed. With the creative spell broken, I stared hard at my work, startled as if seeing it for the very first time.
Angular lines made a strong, stoic jaw. Full lips pressed into a frown. There was a sharp slash of a nose. Two chocolate eyes stared back from beneath determined brows. His hair was pushed back, unkempt in a way he would never really allow. It matched his loose tie and the perplexed scowl he wore—figments of my imagination, characteristics I’d given him in this fictional version that he’d never tolerate in real life.
Staring at my handiwork, I saw that I hadn’t really captured Ezra at all though. My lines were too hard. My colors not exactly right. His eyes were too shallow. His jawline… his cheekbones… his defined edges were too hard and too wrong, and I hated that I hadn’t done them justice. That I’d failed. And I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I was missing something.
This wasn’t Ezra. This was very clearly a picture of someone trying to paint Ezra.
I slumped on my stool, rolling my stiff neck back and forth. “Ugh, why am I even trying with you?” I asked the canvas. I stared at the eyes that weren’t Ezra’s at all. “I still don’t like you.”
My phone buzzed in the other room, so I left Ezra to go grab it. It turned out I had four missed texts, but this one was the first I’d heard. All from Vera.
7:03: Are you a famous rock star yet?
7:48: Are you at least the famous graphic designer for rock stars yet?
8:56: Does the silent treatment mean bad news? Want me to go down to your office and raise hell? Whose ass do I need to kick?
8:59: In other news, I’m heading to spin class at five-thirty tomorrow morning and I need a friend. Please please please? Don’t make me get into wedding shape alone!!!!