The Sketchbook
Every sketchbook should desire to be finished.
For the human mind’s complexity to be splattered onto them. The beauty of art is that it doesn’t require a filter, but intuition. The ability to let go and let the soul paint what words cannot.
I was different.
Why do sketchbooks wish all their pages were filled? For closure, if there ever was such a thing? Closure of what? Closure of a chapter? Closure of images that once lived, free and wild? I sometimes wonder if the birth of an image on my surface meant the death of it, too. Once it’s out of the artist’s mind, the art wasn’t alive anymore.
My pages were overfilled. Masood had stuffed me with different pages because he couldn’t fit his drawings on mine. He came home every day to relax, painting out his worries and fears, enjoyment and love onto me. It felt like whiplash. On one page, his soul painted iridescence. On the other, he drew entrapment.
I enjoyed being his passion. His haven.
I enjoyed his sons’ awe at how he decorated me, learning through examination. As if, by keeping his passion alive in their memories, they wanted to keep him alive, too. Maybe that’s why the last son got a degree in graphic design. It was the safest option with art and employment.
His sons’ children inherited his passion. One way or another. Through anime, work integration, an eye for beauty.
The third son’s daughter intrigued me.
I watched her grow, in love with art. Her greatest passion? To become an artist. Got her first bidder on Facebook. Her mother told her to do something ‘more altruistic’ instead.
She’d stress. Her work never lived up to her vision, even if she liked it. Measured her art’s quality with others’ approval. She would treat it less as soul-expression, and more as worth measurement.
I watched her give it up when she moved from the city everybody hated, yet she never wanted to leave.
It was like how fire dwindles when you don’t replenish it with wood.
She had that wood.
She knew what fire she was destined to emit.
She chose to strike a different match.
Her flame turned blue, and she started writing instead.
Ink spilled across pages that weren’t from any of the sketchbooks she’d barely finished. Her passion for reading and writing turned into a mania while her sketchbooks dusted over. It felt like the bloodline that had kept me alive was dying out.
I remember when she first discovered me. Fingers tracing over the work of a hand she never got to hold.
That is when I realized:
Indeed, art’s a coffin.
She was visiting her grandfather’s grave.
Death brought back life.
The blue flame in her flickered red.
Her flame turned violet.
For a meaningful microsecond.
She tried to get back into art.
Had felt the violet flame.
It made her feel alive, euphoric.
I hope I see it light up her grandfather’s remnants in her, again.
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