“Fine, if you won’t do it, I will.” Sloane grabbed a random paintbrush and headed for the bucket of paint.
“No!” I screamed, lunging to rip the brush out of her hands. “I can’t do it, okay? I can’t fucking do it! I can’t live in a world where my mother doesn’t exist—I can’t try to make beautiful things when she’s dead. She’s fucking dead, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I sobbed.
Sloane crushed me in a hug, refusing to let go of me when I struggled. Her voice was softer and more gentle in my ear. “Then don’t make beautiful things. Make ugly things, make sad things, make compelling things, but make something, anything at all, becauseanythingis better thanthis.” She squeezed me tighter. “Don’t die with her, Sara. You lost your mother, and I feel like I’m losing my best friend.” She cleared her throat. “I know this is selfish, butIneed you. If you won’t do it for yourself or for your mother—maybe you could do it for me? I’m begging you to try.” We sank to the floor, and she held me while I sobbed. Ugly, dirty, raw vulnerability, the kind that would push most people away. But she hugged me through it all and didn’t let go.
When my crying had slowed, I felt the long handle of a paintbrush as she pushed it into my hand. “I can’t.” I cried.
“You can.” She was crying too. “I know you can.”
“I don’t know how to do this. I’llneverbe able to make anything beautiful again.”
“Then make grief art, make hate art, make something, anything, just to remind yourself that you’re fucking alive.” She gripped my hand and gently pushed the brush into the bucket,even as my hand trembled. “You’re alive, Sara, whether you like it or not, you’re still here. So let go of the past and choose to live. Otherwise, you might as well have died with her.” Sloane let go of my hand with a tremor in her own voice. “But I’m so glad you didn’t.”
I sobbed as I moved the brush over the canvas, letting big imperfect globs drop onto it, and then I lowered my hand and made a line. One single line. The feel of the brush against the canvas, scratching an itch I’d long forgotten about.
I stared at that black line for what felt like an eternity, and then I screamed. I kept screaming as I threw the paintbrush across the room and plunged my hands into the paint, scooping, and dumping, and heaving it onto the canvas with my bare hands. Smearing the paintviolently,until the canvas was completely black, until I was covered up to my elbows, my clothes ruined, my hair matted.
Breathless, I narrowed in on the colorful paintings stacked against the wall.I fucking hated them.Had fantasized about destroying them for months now.
I hadn’t known shit when I’d created those joyful, happy, colorful paintings. I’d been an ignorant rainbows and butterflies child that didn’t know a damn thing about the world. About real pain. About grief. I’d been naïve, and stupid, and ignorant, and those paintings deserved to burn, right alongside my old life. I wanted my old art to disappear into the ether, never to exist again, and I decided maybe that was okay, maybe that was what Ihadto do. The thing I’d been guiltily considering this whole time. I had to burn something to the ground before the despair inside me consumed me first.
Throat raw from screaming, I didn’t say a word as I grabbed that first canvas and dragged it across the studio, already my black handprint ruining the corner.
I threw it onto the floor and lifted that heavy-ass paint bucket, because even if I was struggling, Iwasstronger after carrying it around all these weeks. I poured the entirety of it out onto thatmassive canvas and ruined it, one palmful of cheap black paint at a time.
When I was done with that one, I grabbed another, and another—sliding the pool of paint from one canvas to the next, scooping it off the floor, making it stretch as far as it would, until nearly all the pieces were ruined. Some were completely covered, some just a single angry slash when I’d lost interest and moved on to the next one.
So entranced in the task at hand, I’d almost forgotten Sloane was in the room with me. When I finally looked up, transported back from wherever it was I’d gone, she gently called my name, saying, “It’s empty. You did it.”
A strange sort of quiet settled over me as I put the lid back on the bucket and picked it up. I don’t know why I was surprised when it was light in my hands, but I was.
So fucking light, like—a weight had been lifted.
I swung the bucket in a wide circle over my head and then threw my head back and laughed. Actually laughed. Sloane chuckled quietly, and then we looked at each other and broke into hysterical, maniacal laughter.
I placed a hand on my belly, gathering myself, and still, she didn’t say anything. She just waited. Let me have my moment.
“Let’s go turn in my assignment.” I panted, and Sloane walked with me, a quiet reassuring presence, while we crossed through the buildings with me covered head to toe in paint.
Isaac looked surprised from across the walkway, and I didn’t say a word to him, nor did I say a word to anyone else that stopped and stared.
Sloane opened the door for me as we stepped into Professor Alden’s office, and my professor looked up, a split second of surprise on her face, before she smiled wide and proud. “You did it.”
“I did it.” I breathed as she simply pointed to her trash can. “Throw it away?” I asked in disbelief, half wanting to keep the bucket for some strange reason I couldn’t quite explain.
“You don’t need it anymore.” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “It served its purpose.”
“What if I’m not ready to be done with it?” I gaped. I couldn’t just get rid of it, not after everything. It just felt wrong.
“Then I’d say it sounds like you have a new series in mind.” She went back to grading the papers on her desk. “Best get to it if you’re going to submit in time for the exhibition at Basecoat Gallery.” I stood there not knowing what to say, but Professor Alden didn’t look up once after that.
I walked back to my studio dumbfounded. Professor Alden was right. I think I did have an idea. The need to create, to translate everything I’d been feeling all these months onto a canvas, had exploded out of me, and now there was no putting the dark, twisted thing back in the box.
The next morning, Sloane and I cried and said our goodbyes, and then I went to work gathering supplies. As I stared at the gallons upon gallons of clear wax and stacks of multicolored embroidery thread, I knew full well that I was going to regret my bright idea by the time I was finished.
But I’d done it. I’d used the paint, and it had all started with a simple line.And a damn good friend.
The grief was still there, but Professor Alden was right about another thing. I felt the tiniest bit lighter.
