The Pacifist [COMPLETED]

The Necessary Path to Peace

Rachel

The garden shed was full. Rachel had managed to sneak in without her parents noticing, but now she was ready to show her father that she had started painting, for weeks now, and was alright. Even with her heartache, she had survived. Rachel sat in the middle, not minding the dirt getting on her pants, and stared at her work. Her pain. How ironic that her pain from loss had taken away her artistic spark, when it was art that would finally heal her. Or at least help her start down the path of healing.

Life had been paused after Clara had died. Rachel hadn't even managed to work through any of the stages of grief, she had just been... suspended in time. The stages were reflected in her artwork and she knew immediately what she would call the collection: The Necessary Path to Peace.

After Mr. Maxwell had snubbed her, the first piece she had created was closely aligned with anger. But not just any anger— anger that was felt. It wasn't until after she had swiped and splattered her rage onto the canvass that she realized that, even before her sister's death, she had been afraid to feel rage. Simply because she felt she wasn't allowed to but also because when she did feel it, it was almost always towards herself. Rage for not speaking up. Rage for not doing better or learning faster. Rage for being afraid.

... Rage for letting her sister die because she was so— tragically— weak.

Mr. Maxwell was probably the first person where the rage had broken through so strongly she couldn't do anything but feel it. And feel it deeply. This was reflected in the aggressive swipes of the plaster and the careless splatter of red. Rage was messy— and that was okay.

Acceptance had been her second piece. This one also featured plaster but it was smooth, placed over wispy brush strokes of black and gray in perfect squares, as if repairing a broken wall. Flower petals had been gently pressed into the plaster and dusted with gold; an effort to make the ugly beautiful while also paying homage to what was lost... what had died and laid beneath the perfect squares. This piece was eerily similar to denial, the only difference being that there were no signs of brokenness, pain, or loss. Just the flowers and gold on stark white nothingness. But if one looked closely, they would find hairline cracks in the squares of plaster, suggesting that denial could only hold on for so long. Without the foundation of reflection and resolution, the patches were mere band-aids.

Depression was a self portrait, of how Mr. Maxwell must have seen her that day by the canal. A cut out photograph of the back of herself, was blurry and dead center. Modge podge had been sponged over it and the cutout floated in a sea of blues and grays, seemingly drowning in unassuming strokes of color. This piece had been hard and Rachel had to take many photographs. It was important that her posture was relaxed and clearly conveyed thorough the image; because depression was dangerous like that. A drowning was never violent or hectic, it was quiet. Calm. Just like in her art piece. It too, could be mistaken for acceptance with the deceiving calm, as if it meant the subject was fine with being afloat in the grief.

The last piece was, Bargaining. This one had been the hardest because she didn't feel she had ever gone through that stage. Then Mr. Maxwell's words had come to her: Survivor's Guilt. Was it not a kind of bargaining? The other side of feeling bad that you still lived while your loved one was gone, was wishing it would have been you instead of them. Even as Rachel looked at her work, she thought she would trade her life for her sister's if she could. This piece featured a photograph of her and her sister that had been cut, separating them. Then she had cut their heads and switched them. Her face, on her sisters body, laid under a blue glass mosaic, while her sister's face on her body stood off to the side, surrounded by flowers that matched the ones in Acceptance and Denial. Both the glass and flowers had been placed in a swirling pattern, enveloping the two sisters with tendrils coming off as if the centrifugal force of the swirling cast the glass and flowers into one another.

"I don't think I'll ever create anything so meaningful again," Rachel whispered to the art. "I miss you, Clara."

Rachel stood, excited to show her work to her father and went to find him.