Eight Count ✔️

SEVEN

There was a time when Dax drew up tiny designs on napkins for fun while I spent my time under darkened skies spindling dances together.

I could only make unintelligible marks on a page. Dax would topple to the ground if he tried dancing in step with me.

My corner of shame is filled with sketchbook upon sketchbook, pages I tore from notebooks, and canvases splashed with disgraceful arrays of color. I can't erase them completely.

I always feel a deep chill while skimming the knee high stack. There is only shame in me, shame that I made such pieces.

I have this same corner in my heart.

My heart pounds in rhythmic steps, lapping my brain ten times over.

I flip the page.

I hate painting.
There is no love in destructing the clean surface.
I can't go back to the start.
My heart is heavy,
applying colors of ruin.

Olly says it's beautiful.
She must be lying.
There is no beauty here.

With shaky fingers I trace the words again and again. I want to find him, embrace him in a hug, and tell him everything will be okay like some child, like the child I used to be.

I want to find him. Why would I want to find the guy who ruined my career?

Still, I let my fingers drift across the page.

I love painting.
There are bright colors
But I like dark ones best.
They are like nightime,
a time of peace when stars come play.
I don't think there would be a place for stars
without the night sky.
I couldn't see them, at least.

Not as long as they burn.

I want to laugh.

I want to cry.

I want to forget all the things Dax used to say, but those words are in front of me, back to haunt and draw up everything I wanted to forget.

Yet, I turn the page.

I tried something new today. My corner of shame disappeared. I can't see my heavy lead on pages. Those are hidden in a cardboard box now, under my bed, and behind a stack of maths books I don't plan to move. I can't see my painted streaks either. Those are hidden behind a whitish layer of paint.

But I can still see them.

Olly can't. She thought I bought new ones.

Without pause, my eyes flick to the adjacent words.

I painted my whited canvas today. It looks good, I think.

But I still know of the canvases of shame. The memories won't leave me.

There is something nice about that.

Shivers shoot down my spine.

The handwriting is from a time where my memories stand in a flow. Here I thought he used the sketchbook for drawing. No, he wrote lines in this book, filling at least half the pages.

Some of the words speak to conversations I had with him, others to thoughts I never knew he had. And as I read on, I feel as though I'm invading a private space.

It's as if I'm living in his head.

His thoughts are like a dance. Freestyle by the looks of it, mixing things that no one though to be mixed and creating things that would have never been included in rigid ballroom steps before. There is little order here, let alone a single brand of personality. One page is a walk through a creepy forsst while another stares at the sun. There is everything in between, too.