Entry Six

I placed my pen to the paper and tried to release myself onto the page.  It was nothing as simple as just getting back on a bicycle.  It had been nearly two years since I had had the urge to draw last.  It was as if my ink well of inspiration had dried up from exposure to my cold nature.

I guess, forgetting how to express yourself takes many forms, that perhaps drawing goes hand in hand with communication.  Where is the line between art and writing anyway?  Can the delicate strokes of your hand writing be so supreme as to be art?  Is the picture that can be painted with words really any different than the one that can be painted with a brush?

Actually, it was my handwriting that got me into the idea of drawing again.  It was horrible uneven, as if each letter had its own identity that I had fulfilled by jotting it onto the page.  When I took the idea to an ever further extreme by practicing with a calligraphy pen the result was paragraph after paragraph of beautifully articulated letters with individualized grace.  I almost wanted to see her again, just to show her.  Almost.

I couldn’t take the pain in her eyes.  Even though nothing made me happier than being by her side, the thought that just the sight of me and what I had become, the hell I had gone through, and the ever burning question, was it all her fault, well, it was all too much for me to bear.  I loved her too much to see her hurt, even if that meant I would never see her again.

Of course, I figured that when and if I learned how to talk again I could find my way back into her arms.  It was obvious from the last time that she had strong feelings for me that lay right on the surface, it was too bad that as of now they were all negative.  That could change.  If I could talk, I could become everything that I once was, be her hero again.  It might take some work, but if she still felt so strongly about me after years of silence I’m sure I wouldn’t have to talk for long before she was in my arms again.

For now I had to learn how to express myself again.  My first strokes looked suspiciously like a lower case “a” connected to a mirrored capital “b”. Then, a “c” wrapped around a “d” formed something like an eye. I drew a spontaneous flourish like an “e” in the Center. “L’s” both lower and uppercase and often inverted formed flowing hair.

Sure, it was something.  A baby step.  But it wasn’t what I wanted.  It was chunky and unrealistic, but somewhat expressive.  

I didn’t let these humble beginnings deter me in the slightest.  Over time my work became more realistic, then surreal with an almost cubist aesthetic.  Somehow, I managed to capture something in the people, in an almost characture like sense, that stemmed from my own unique viewpoint.  Something no one else could see.  These qualities that I distilled in my work became the focal point until the work was nothing but that surreal quality I saw in people, and as the works evolved, they became less realistic and more abstract, yet they seemed to express the essence of a person’s being more than you could see with the naked eye.  

It was a result of careful observation, not of how they looked, the façade they put forth for others, no, to replicate this I felt, would be to copy their own art in the way that they presented themselves.  Instead, I focused on what they were hiding with each stroke of a makeup brush and each sculptural piece of clothing.  In these works I distilled their fears and insecurities, phobias and flaws.  It was the essence of their denial of themselves that shone through in my art, and the more they tried to hide the more I could reveal.

One unexpected consequence of this was that I became rather adept at spotting pregnant women, months before they showed any physical signs of their pregnancy.  There were other things I found myself able to spot as well.  For instance, I became very good at spotting psychological disorder, due in part to my heavy psychology course load.  I could even go so far as predicting a person’s behavior.  I didn’t notice this abilities right away, of course, I just started to notice that the situations I drew people in quite often came true, at least in part.  My art was almost like looking at a face in a mirror from a different time in their life.

I would have to guess that stripping a person down so much in a psychological sense in my work left my final products naked.  I could tell this from the looks on their faces when they might happen to see the drawing.  No matter how abstract the work was, their faces all showed the same horror and disgust when they saw my depiction of them.  They knew, even if their figure wasn’t apparent, what I meant to say when I drew them, and in most cases it was something they didn’t want to face, or at least something they didn’t want anyone to notice.  It was completely different when someone saw me drawing another person.  They seemed pleased, almost excited when they saw my work, and perhaps a bit confused.  They didn’t get it the same way my subjects did, as if my depiction was written in a language only the observed and I could understand.

Of course, I found either of these reactions annoying.  I began to draw more secretly, sometimes from unusual vantage points, like perched on a wall, or with the drawing pad out of view, such as, under a table.  Eventually, I made a habit of wearing clothes with enormous pockets and drawing on increasingly small pads, so that not even I could see what I was drawing.  Of course, this had implications I hadn’t expected, such as even more funny looks as I seemed to be digging around in my pants pockets for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.  I don’t even want to guess what they were thinking when they saw this.

Even after I decided that this may not be the least conspicuous way to draw I did continue drawing without looking at the page, practicing this so much that my skills became equal in accuracy and detail to the ones that I had looked at.

This continued for three month, and was my only form of communication with Connor not returning to school until later that year.  I didn’t know why, and even after he returned I didn’t find out right away.  That wasn’t because I didn’t ask, but because he didn’t have the cards to answer.  He refused the pad of paper when I handed it to him.  He refused to make cards to answer me.  Despite all of my accumulated skill in reading people, I couldn’t seem to understand what was going on in his head.