Sketches of the Future

I can barely remember the time before the sketches. 

The days of old, as the poets might say, or the good old days, as my grandma would claim. 

It all melts into a confused haze, in much the same way as Dali’s clocks did with the invisible heat of time. It was a time of weirdness, where everything was so dull that one could barely tell one day from the other. I still had a day job in those days, and still worried about paying bills and being on time even as I wasted all my time. In those days, when I came home in the evenings, everything seemed so empty -so out of place, so quiet, even foreign.

That was before the sketches, of course. Before they started reawakening the world.

It was on a warm evening. Warm, at least, inside the one-bedroom apartment that was my placeholder for a home. Outside, it was freezing. 

I had come back from work not half an hour ago, and my grilled-cheese was burning in the pan. I was ignoring it. Who would even care if my food was half charcoal? I hadn’t spoken to a living soul in days. Only dead souls, the ones that pretend to care but don’t even know themselves anymore.

The grilled-cheese was burning, and I was staring at a picture on the wall. It was ugly, really; a decrepit painting that I had imagined --and, unfortunately, brought into existence-- when I was just eleven years old. When I looked at the muddled colours forming what was meant to be a sea dragon challenging the Loch Ness monster, which, somehow, had found his way out of his safe harbour to swim the confused seas of pre-teenagehood. I could almost see the little boy, far too small for his age, wearing braces and an oversized Beatles t-shirt, reflected in the glass protecting the canvas. He was a weird one, that boy. A deluded dreamer who spent his days thinking there was a brighter world hidden somewhere in the future. I would have told him not to even bother continuing his research; but I knew he wouldn’t listen. He never would.

So, I did the only thing I knew would affect him, that mindless boy.

I took the painting off its hook on the wall and threw it on the ground. Almost to my surprise, the glass shattered, scattering over the floor. I nodded to myself.

That’s when it all began, really. When reality started.

That evening, as it was warm inside, cold outside and my grilled-cheese burning in the pan, I grabbed a broom, swept the shards off the painting and took hold of the nearest marker. It was a black felt-tip one, like you might spot advertised at bus stops of remote locations that haven’t seen a proper ad in decades. 

Still, I took the marker, and challenged the little boy, the younger self, the dead self, the living memory of a time before calcinated food and day jobs and un-homey apartments.

And I drew a moustache on the sea dragon. 

Then, for good measure, a pair of round glasses were added. I had Nietzsche in mind; but honestly, he looked more like an unhinged version of John Lennon after one too many circles of the hypnotising wheels watched across countless sleepless nights.

You should have seen its face, truly; the sea dragon looked as grand as I did in my graduation pictures. Not very much at all, that is.

Distinctly, quite distinctly, I can remember smiling at my artwork. Graffitis on my old self’s disasterpiece. 

But then, the dragon smiled back.

Slowly, as an alligator sliding through the mud of an undersized pond, it started slithering, crawling, gliding in the dried paint of its storming sea. Flakes of neon blue and emo black broke into tidal waves, becoming dust on my floor amongst the splinters of glass as the creature arose from its coma.

Still, the dragon was smiling. The expression under his moustache, under its glasses, was as if pasted on its face, unmoving, as the rest of its body slowly emerged from the waves, rising higher and higher, until the creature -what name to give it at that point, I wasn’t even sure- stood at eye level with me.

‘’Well, good evening, Disappointment.’’

I started back. How did he know my name? Who had told him? Surely it wasn’t my younger self, the deluded, dead version of me, who wanted to change the world and still packed sandwiches for lunch, without the melted cheese, without the ashes of adulthood. 

However, I couldn’t look bemused. Not in front of the nihilistic sea-dragon that was invading my tiny, messy, comfortably uncomfortable living room. So, I simply replied.

‘’Good evening to you, Mr. Lizard. Want anything to drink?’’

The dragon stretched itself, its flat surface twisting into the air until it came to rest atop my shoulder. 

It huffed. ‘’I doubt you have anything remotely digestible inside this prison you call your habitation. So, would you kindly take this piece of paper, right there, and draw me a double-shot espresso with a hint of vanilla and a triple scoop of cinnamon? I need the later if I am to spit any fire at all.’’

Well, finally, a request that made sense! Promptly, I took hold of the scrap of paper and sketched a few traits. I added dots for the cinnamon, and wrote ‘’vanilla’’ in parenthesis to indicate that’s what the drink would taste like. The dragon accepted it gratefully. As he sipped at it, leisurely, still gracing my shoulder with its weightless presence, I couldn’t help but stare just a little. Piece by piece, as I looked at him, my life was starting to come alive. And on the floor, piece by piece, the broken glass that used to reflect my younger self was coming back together into a portal towards a time as unknown as the past.

‘’I think you should quit your job, really,’’ the dragon said from above its drink, its philosophical air not leaving him for one second as cinnamon stuck to his moustache. 

‘’Why?’’ I asked.

‘’Because it fits your name too well. You must get out of your comfort zone, Dizzy, if you are to ever thrive in life.’’

I blinked a few times. As the pieces in my mind continued to collide, chasing away the haze I had always lived in, and the pieces on the floor continued reflecting the smoke slowly pooling inside the apartment, I walked, sleepwalked, really, to the oven and grabbed my burnt grilled-cheese, dozing the flames that had started mistaking it for a free-range candle. It tasted just like my life.

And so, I did as the dragon said. There was not much to lose, was there? I quit my job. I let the building owners evict me from my apartment -what did it even matter anyway? I stopped cooking, and staring at my old self, and shattering the past into a semblance of future. 

Instead, I drew.

I drew cities. I drew bridges. I drew feasts held for kings, and cocktails for jesters. Soon, the city I lived in became the mirror of a reality most could not yet see, as landscapes came to life on the walls of convenience stores or under bridges at night. I drew places, and I drew companions. 

They started following me everywhere. Through the frozen streets that soon melted into puddles, and then dried into gardens. They followed me as, for hours, I watched cargo ships depart from the city’s port, to face the sea and the Loch Ness monster that had lost its way home. 

They formed a court, and I was their king; my sketches, they soon took over the entire city. On the side of every building, there were lines melding into worlds of their own, monuments to mock a life flatter than drawn lines.

Eventually, other people started noticing them too. How could they not? When you see a stick figure dragging its stick dog dragging its own fetched stick in the middle of the sticky street, you have to press the brakes. And when you wait in line at the grocery store, and an elderly goblin, its frazzled lines barely holding together, steps near you with an armload of sour candies, don’t you have to let it cut in front of you, for mercy’s sake?

The souls of the city’s inhabitants were dead; but my sketches came to life, and soon, they started inventing themselves. My marker was long dead, by then; but did it even matter, when a hundred more had been drawn, and could now dictate lines of their own? No more manufactures were needed to produce plastic-coated sticks of ink; only their walls and floors and ceilings, that could be drawn on some more and create much grander merchandise than the machinery they contained, were needed. It was boundless; it was alive; it was prestigious.

It was dangerous.

You can change a city’s fate, you can rewrite reality; but once it is written, you can’t erase it.

And there comes a point, dear younger self, when you can’t even remember how reality was like before you reinvented it.

You can’t remember how it was to live without the dragon on your shoulder, whispering into your ear and burning more holes into your memory with its cinnamon breath.

And as the city starts dissolving into an arena of collided worlds, one taking over the other, you can’t remember who you were, what you saw, what you hoped the future would bring; because the future, you rewrote it, and the landscapes, you redrew them, and your companions, while they were more lively than the dead souls who had forgotten who they were, were never even alive; and you start to question whether you ever were alive yourself, or whether a bored nihilistic artist drew you simply to avoid facing the reality that they had entrapped themself in.