A Conversation with the Past

(The nature of this post springs from an old comment I posted back on an entry from The Last Embassy, titled “Conversations with the Past.” before I started blogging. Most of my conversations with the past involve some amount of self-loathing introspection.)

I’m doing some schoolwork… research while out on a Hawaiian cruise on New Year’s Eve. Such is the way of things with me. I do it because I need to, but I’m none too happy about spending precious vacation time this way. Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone I haven’t seen in a while. He had been sitting there, waiting for me to turn around and notice him, because he was too shy to talk. I turned to regard him… he seemed to be about eleven years old this time. I knew he wouldn’t be the first to say something, so I broke the ice.

“Hello, there.”

“Hi.”

“Happy New Year.”

*silence*

“What’s on your mind?”

“You’ve been feeling bad lately.”

*nod*

“Bad about still being me.”

I smile sadly, but say nothing. I don’t want to put it on his/our shoulders any more. I’ve been actively trying to get over it, and poor little mellow has done his share of crying.

“You have nice friends. They talk to you and make you feel better.”

“Yeah. They’re sweet, aren’t they…?”

At this point I notice a certain look in his eyes. Young m. mellow never smiled. At school, he was always too busy hiding, sulking, and nursing bruises to learn how to smile. But I remember that we always got a certain earnest look in our eyes when we were anticipating something good. The mouth didn’t know how to react, though the spirit certainly felt the intensity.

“You have a secret to share, don’t you? I can tell.”

*nod* “Yeah. Your friends are trying to make you feel better, and I want to try too. I’ll show you something.”

eleven mellow brings us back to art class, somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade. I always dreaded art class… I was never any good at it. I never did figure out how it came so easily to everyone else. My clumsy fingers could never sculpt anything that looked right. I couldn’t draw straight, sure lines, couldn’t figure out how to shade, couldn't draw proper perspective, and didn’t have an artistic imagination. I didn’t even have a sense of humor that the others could recognize. The paints, the pencils, the chalk, the clay – all of them were fascinating for their novelty, but I never figured out when and where all the other kids learned how to use them. I was asked to pick these things up and do something with them, time and time again, and I never knew how to use them. Art class was just like recess, and just like P.E. … I was always the runt who never had a handle on the game.

Today, it’s pastels. We were supposed to sketch a daytime tropical island vantage… a coconut tree growing from off the side of the frame, a sandy dune in the foreground giving way to a beach in the near distance, and beyond that, a deep blue ocean beneath an azure sky. Some of the other children had added a bright yellow sun high in the sky or beautiful renditions of clouds in gray and white. I was having an awful time. My tree looked cartoony, flat, and unreal. Downright ugly. I had never seen a real coconut tree; I only had the vaguest guess as to what one really looked like. I just knew that it looked like some kind of palm tree. I didn’t know where to draw bands of alternating dark and light, didn’t know the proportions, and my sky looked boringly blue, with no gradation of color, and I was scared, deathly scared of adding a sun because the way everything else was turning out, it would look bad too.

In a moment of desperate frustration, I grabbed the black pastel and started blacking out the tree, blacking out the sand, the dunes, everything. If it were all totally black, there would be no need for detail, no agonizing over shading and colors and depth, no challenge of the three-dimensional. Everyone else was almost done with theirs but I had little progress to show, and I hurriedly traced the black pastel across the paper until no hint of brown or green or beige showed through.

I grabbed the two darkest blue pastels and used them to wipe out the sky, wipe out the clouds, and turn the sea a deep midnight blue. With fifteen minutes to go, I nervously grabbed the unused orange, yellow, and red pastels from my box and started to work on adding the sun. I added the sun near the horizon, a great, warm, reddish-orange half-circle, already half-sunk into the sea. I traced the sun’s colors into the ocean, hoping that the effect would look as if the warm colors of the sunset were reflecting their last rays upon waves already settling into the night. The black tree, dune, and beach were not mistakes. They were cover-ups for my artistic ineptitude, but now they would also be the silhouettes left by the waning light of dusk. The art teacher walked by my table, and I froze in fright. It was wrong, all wrong. Everyone’s picture was of the daytime. Light blue skies, well-detailed coconut trees, bright blues… mine was sleepy and dark, and completely the wrong time of day. Theirs suggested warm breezes and the calling of sea birds. Mine suggested stillness, and the quiet rustling of palm trees at the end of the day. Theirs were awake and mine was asleep. I was in trouble again, I knew it.

“That’s good!”

I didn’t dare to look up any more than I dared to believe hearing it. Everyone knew I was bad at everything. Softball, volleyball, flag football, art, jokes, everything. I was bad at tetherball too, but I felt less bad about that, since we all know that tetherball’s just the dumbest damn game ever; the taller person always wins.

A few of the other kids came over to look at my sketch, and I shrank from the scrutiny, but much to my surprise everyone liked it because it was so different, because it really did manage to convey that sense of tropical paradise that we were all supposedly going after. I was so used to obsessing over the technical challenges of art that I had never really known that there was something more to it than trying so hard to draw properly. It was the one good day I had in art class.

“See? You’re no good at it, but you still did something right. They liked it, they all did. It was almost perfect, you know. They were all better at it than you, and then you went and did something crazy to try to fix it. And you didn’t even know how. You just got there somehow. You just did something nobody else thought of, that’s all.”

I’m still drinking in the memory, a little too stunned to answer forthwith, but I turn to eleven mellow and smile.

“We’re not perfect. We never will be. We’re too small, too weak, and too shy. But we’re not really that bad, you know?”

We look at each other. I can see the tears on my own face reflected in his.

“I thought of it because… well, we saw this picture last week, didn’t we? We’re in Hawaii now. We saw it for real. And with the way you’ve been feeling lately, I know you’ve been thinking a lot about me, and…”

I just turn around and grab eleven mellow in a big hug, which he returns in his own awkward and unsure way.

"Happy New Year."

“Happy New Year.”