Messy sketchbook

It’s Monday morning. In times like this, I tend to understand where the stereotypical Monday-morning mood comes from. After having finished a box of chocolate cereal before school—which I have started regretting—my belly and my palms feel nice and warm inside the huge pocket of my oversized black sweatshirt. I am comfortably sitting at the back of the classroom, when the happy-go-lucky art teacher comes in.

“Good morning, everyone!” she screams in that piercing tone that makes my poor ears tingle. “Let’s take our sketchbooks and have an outdoor lesson today. Spring is here, the birds are singing!” she sings like a wannabe soprano.

 I can hear the class’s reluctant murmurs as the background sound while I’m still half-asleep with my head against the wall. I cannot even imagine myself trying to discover where my sketchbook is, which I doubt I have purchased since the beginning of the term. Even worse, the thought of having to go out in the chilly, humid air makes me want to die faster.

“We can exercise on depicting the shades of the trees…” I hear her voice fading while the rest of the class follows her outside. At the same time, I can feel my bff, Penn, smiling from cheek to cheek next to me, without even looking at her. I’m sure she can’t miss anything out of an ordinary, dull class. She’s already piled a messy sketchbook and a quite huge collection of pencils on her lap when she ruffles my brown curls with her long, red-knuckled fingers.

“C’mon lazy bones. Get up. Can’t you feel the inspiration running through your veins?”

I attempt to shoot her a blank, cold look, as if I can’t stand her messing my hair; though she’d the only human being whom I let to touch me.

 “No,” I grumble.

She shoots me a half-smile and her left dimple comes to light. I see her carelessly tearing off a piece of paper and handing it to me together with a full set of art tools.

 “You could at least try.”

           A chilly breeze slams my face and I start hating my life a bit more. The rest of the nerds are already sitting around the greenery, supposedly interested in sketching the trees. The rest of the bastards are simply ignoring the poor lady. The even possibility of spoiling my black pants with soil is disgusting, but because everyone is down, I sit too. My eyes immediately search for Penn. I finally detected her from her beloved green hoodie. She’s perfectly engaged in her artwork while typically biting one side of her bottom lip. That means she’s completely tangled up in her imagination.

I approach and stand behind her without saying a word. My eyes follow the tense lines and smooth curves that her left hand creates. The blank paper comes to life, I tell myself. Sometimes her fantasy flows out, to add her own elements in the drawing.

I take a miserable look at my empty paper and notice it’s used at the back. The other side is full of destroyed or scribbled sketches. I kind of feel sorry for all those works of art that she finds rubbish. One of them looks lots like me, though it’s is certainly a much better version of my face.

           “Why do you like drawing?” I ask after a long time.

Penn’s familiar voice fills my thoughts, while she never takes her eyes off the drawing.

“Just look at the beauty, Georgi. Take spring, for example.”

I don’t quite understand, but I try to follow her thought, which is entirely abstract for my cynic logic.

“All you need to do is look around. The sky, an endlessly bright thole, an ethereal and clear light blue, so pure that the eyes sometimes hurts if you stare at it for too long. And even the clouds, always changing in a way they can never be just clouds. They take shapes that tell magnificent stories.”

I observe her almond-shaped eyes glowing out her passion. Those silken lashes curve joyfully at the corners when she smiles and the galaxy of freckles light up her face. I’m glad she can’t see my emotional side.

“What about the sun? Its warming gold shines upon everything and everyone, giving life to all those spring blooms. Their colors, they just fill you up with admiration as they blend one next to the other. The shades, the texture of the trees, you feel an urge to touch them, to smell the soil. And all those different greens everywhere, they’re so magically combined, so varied that I could spend hours trying to capture every hue.”

She puts her pencil down. That’s when her eyes, shining like melting honey, rest on me.

“That’s why I love painting, ‘cause it’s a chance to depict all that beauty.”

           I don’t say anything and I bet she thinks I can’t understand her. Because I’m not like that, I don’t think in colors. Life can be strictly black or white, I used to think. Yet, today I tried to see through her eyes and this crispy Monday morning truly looks a lot better. At least I got Penn, a friendly reminder that it’s not only a Monday morning; it’s the dawning of spring.

           It’s 4.00 a.m. and this memory fills the hours. I lie on my bed, wide-eyed and unmoving, just like every sleepless night. It came to my mind, since it all happened a year ago. This spring, I’m starting to realize that I have gone back to my black-and-white theory about life. Penn isn’t here to show me the colors of the first blossoms. She’s in the US, making her dream come true after getting a scholarship for a year. And I’m still here, dully wearing my Air pods without paying attention to the lyrics of ‘Wish you were here’. Maybe they’re already out of battery.

           My knees curl up as I sit against the head of the bed. I rest my head upon them so as to calm down; I’m having a panic attack. My chest is becoming heavier with every breath. After several moments covered in cold sweat, the numbness retreats, but I still feel the pain. I miss her, I’m realizing I miss the most important person in my life as I panic. She’s the only one who knows how I feel.

           With the thought of Penn, I turn towards our friendship lamp. The next moment, I press blue, the color I use for sadness. Yet, I doubt she’ll see it or answer back now, she’s got a load of things to do there, rather than deal with another night crisis of mine. I keep staring at the lamp, till my numbness drags me into a dizzy, half-sleeping condition.

           Next to me, the lamp begins to glow.