Fix: A Two-Part Story

Spring, age 19

Charcoal scratched against the textured paper. The sound overpowered the low hum of the music. Sun filtered into the room, lighting up the drawing in front of him. Every time he marked the page with the dark marks, small clouds of the charcoal puffed up into the air.

Serenity fell around him.

And why not?

He finally had it all—the girl, the security, his art, and a place to do the art.

His own fucking studio—a gift to himself. Once Port Sheridan no longer felt new, he started to feel the aimlessness that came with taking a gap year. Part of him knew it would happen, just not so quickly. Port Sheridan offered no routine, not like he had in Connersville. There was also nowhere he could really go to be alone. The lack of space in the apartment made it difficult for him to carve out a sanctuary. He started to need something for himself. Josephine, Gerry, and Tabitha were caught up in school. He wanted to be caught up in something.

Luckily, while stuck, lost on what to do next, he saw the rent signs plastered on the glass entry way on the side of the Upper End near the university. It was a nice building, nothing too flashy. The promises of 'five hundred square feet with natural lighting and utilities included all for under twelve hundred dollars' was all it took for him to walk right in. That same day, he got the walkthrough, signed the papers and paid up the full two years for the lease. By the time Josephine finished her classes that day he had his own studio apartment, keys in hand. At midnight the same day, they laid naked on the floor having christened the space in one of the few ways they knew how. There wasn't even time for them to get an air mattress as they fell into each other.

He honestly loved it. Open layout for the kitchenette and the living area and single wall that gave the bathroom privacy. It wasn't as nice or new as their shared apartment but that's not what mattered.

What mattered was that it was his. All his.

A place that was millions of miles from where he started. A place that was too good to be true. Max alluded to this that day in his study. That what his father and his grandparents left him would lead to limitless possibilities. Seeing it come to fruition felt good. It felt right. The tactile evidence motivated him, creating a purpose.

Wasting no time, he filled the apartment. Paint packed drawers sorted by type—watercolor, gouache, oil, acrylic—and by color. He bought materials to make his own canvases. Colored pencils, crayons, different types of pastels were stuffed away in the kitchen cabinets. He'd only dabbled so far in his horde of materials, but they were there at his fingertips whenever the need arose. The volume of projects that cluttered the small space held no rhyme or reason to their subject matter or placement. His obsessive neatness reserved for the storing of his materials.

As he made the transition from sketchbooks to canvas, his style changed. What used to be artistic studies of objects that focused on the fundamentals morphed onto Technicolor abstracts that didn't follow the rules. Those were just spur of the moment urges coming to life in a kaleidoscope of lines and hues. The real challenges were the ones of Josephine.

The pieces of her were photo realism. Like he was trying to commit every part of her to memory in his mind, body, and spirit. She'd become his muse. The driving force behind the majority of his creations.

She was the subject of the piece he currently worked on. Originally it had been a picture. One he'd taken of her in bed on his phone. The frame caught the swell of her chest, her collarbones, her unruly curls from the night before, her thousand watt smile mid laugh, scrunched up eyes and nose. A blur smeared across her face as her arm tried to block the camera. A purely candid and untainted moment that Gage knew he needed to recreate with his own hands.