!Author's Notes!

Before you read, please note that I am Canadian. I use the British English spelling of words. They are not spelt wrong, they are just a slightly different dialect. I am also a minor and therefore not a professional just yet, so I am very much open to constructive criticism on my story. Thank You!

"I am my Own Muse"

Quinn R. Bonds

Muses are known to be sought out and picked by beauty alone. But the artist will never experience love and an understanding of their anatomy to an intimate level like muse knows. The artist is but a name on a card below the very essence of the muse, framed in gold and hung in museums.

Constance Fischer is the artist with no muse. With brushes, easels, and acrylic paint, she finds the beauty in everything. She'll paint a bowl of fruit like it is the holy grail and a person like an angel, or more; a god. Even with her skills, Constance yearns for an understanding from someone else. She wants someone to understand her body; to understand its curves, its divots, imperfections, and the structure that makes up who she is. She yearns for an artist like her to have a watchful eye on the details of her being like she does with even dying leaves, poetically fallen to the ground in defeat.

She has tried to find this kind of love in many places: her college classes, Tinder, friends. Each pool of people never amounts to the way she truly wants to be seen and loved. Tragic, that loss can come from something you've never even touched.

So here she sits in front of one of her blankest easels in her studio; the rest are unfinished projects of muses she gained and lost before completion. Her muses never stay. She uses them, selfishly, as a way to help herself feel better about her needed love. If she can love others the way she wants to be loved, then maybe somebody will copy her actions and find her in the sea of other fish.

Constance ran fingers over her face. She pressed into the pockets that were her eyes, feeling the edge of the bone and remembering its shape before sketching it onto the textured white slate. She did so with every bone her fingers could reach beneath her skin, wrapped like a Christmas present, hiding gold, silver, and rubies underneath. She etched and she felt herself; how her bones felt, how they moved, their size. She memorised everything.

The strokes of the pencil began to take the form of a person. The eyes began to gain life; thoughts; a conscience behind them. But the person she stared at, at the other end of the pencil was not her. Objectively, it was. Every rudimentary shape was the exact same; a masterful sketch. But the life in her eyes seemed to have seen a past different from hers. This was an empty husk; it was not Constance Fischer. She tried again.

She drew over her piece, tweaking even the smallest details. She changed the pose, she gave more life to the eyes. And when she stepped back, pencil in hand, she was once again met with the face of a stranger. Who is that? Why is she in place of a portrait of me? she thought. She couldn't understand why this was so hard to do. She couldn't help but sit down, defeated like the fallen leaves of autumn. She damn near brought herself to tears; she wondered if she was even a good artist at all; would her work ever amount to anything?

After a sob, a cry, and couple abused paintbrushes, Constance gained the strength to stand once again. She thought to herself of what could possibly be blocking her path to recreating her very being. It seemed easy enough, but she may as well be battering a 10 ft. brick wall with a 4 inch stick. She stared at the painting of "her" for what seemed like eternity. Her eyes glided over every stroke of pencil she'd drawn and erased on the canvas. 

Suddenly, it was like someone from higher planes of enlightenment had finally lit a match to the oil lamp above her head. She knew why she had such a hard time drawing her own person: she was drawing a woman who wasn’t her because she was thinking of drawing  herself purely for the gain of satisfaction of her aching heart. When she etched a woman onto the canvas, she wasn’t thinking of the life she had lived when she painted herself. She didn’t see her father’s rustic backyard or her mother’s sewing in her tattered clothes behind the eyes of the woman she had drawn twice fold. She didn’t see her traumas or her triumphs reflecting in the dark seas swirling in the eyes of her. She didn’t feel a tint of emotion emanating from the woman before her. The girl she had painted was a husk because the artist had painted the muse without true feeling; raw emotions weren’t present.

Constance picked up her last, undamaged paintbrush and pencil. She tucked the paintbrush behind her ear; it’s time will come. 

She cautiously approached the canvas, fire in her eyes. The pencil made contact with the canvas. With her new eyes, she again re-sketched the ones staring back at her. With Constance's nerves at an all-time high, the tip almost broke at first touch from the pressure she applied; she was nervous that even with her newfound perspectives, her nerves surged with the electricity of anticipation.

Stroke.

Stroke.

Stroke. 

She began to see herself in her own painting. A small smile and a wave of joy washed over every sense. Eagerly, like a hungry lion having been starving for decades and in desperate need of a meal this satisfactory, she sketched faster. Lines overlapped and came together to create shapes Fischer never knew her aching hands could ever create. She focused on the eyes. On who she was painting. Who is this woman? What has she been through? What has she seen? What does she love? What does she despise? How many triumphs has she cherished? How many losses have broken her heart? 

A person came into view from a blurry sea of shapes and colours as though they had been lost in this fuzzy sea of an identity unknown for years. Now that Constance had taken the time to get to know her, her image began to become crisp and clear again after so many years suppressed in the darkness.

Constance threw down the pencil. She didn’t take any time to pick apart her creation. She trusted herself and the woman she was getting to know with her full chest.

Paints of all sorts of colours splashed onto her palette, littered with dried clumps of colours from muses she once knew. The fresh paint draped over the old, painting a new picture on the palette; a new feeling and a new era. 

Constance dipped her brush gently into the wet globs of reds, blues, yellows, greens, and the like. She took her time mixing every colour she knew her colour scheme had. She took extra care copying her own image and transferring its beauties, both hidden and loud, onto the canvas. The paint rolled smoothly onto her brush and applied like butter to the skeleton of what she trusted would soon be a mirror.

Hours passed. Maybe even a full day had passed. Never the matter; her masterpiece was finished. Scratch that. A painting of oneself is never completed; people change and new layers of paint will need to be added until the paint behind to emboss beyond the width of a slip of paper and into years of the history of a constantly developing person.

Either way, the last stroke was finished ever-so-slowly. Constance’s hands ached from slaving away the easel, but it would all be worth it in the end, she knew. Constance slipped the messied palette off of her thumb and gently set it down next to her. Carefully, she backed away from the painting, a full picture coming into view at an agonisingly slow pace. 

She stood lifeless like a statue for a moment. Her hands trembled and she stitched them together at her front as she flicked her gaze over everything she had just created. She finally saw herself. She saw her smile lines and her wrinkles in the painting, yes. But most importantly, it felt like her. And she knew exactly what to title it.

“I am my Own Muse.”