From the time Lucy was walking she had a pencil in her hand and would drag it across anything white. No matter where she went it was on her person. It's been years since I've seen her, but that was what I loved most about her, but something had changed. That afternoon, as I stood at the doorway to her studio, to surprise her with my visit, I got taken aback instead.
It was dark and dreary not like the cheerful Lucy I knew from the letters we wrote to each other. In her letters she'd always describe having the windows open to spill light across the studio floor, her stereo playing Mozart or Bach to inspire her movements; this was not the same studio I knew from pictures either and it worried me what I saw.
Everywhere there was art that was started and left unfinished. There were canvas' strewn across the floor, easels, or walls. Her paints were left in chunky smears of unrecognizable colors. Her sculptures were a mess of steel, wood, and glass. The shapes so distorted and vile that they themselves seemed to scream from the way they were contortioned. I stood at the entryway troubled and sickened, two emotions I thought I'd never get from seeing Lucy's artwork.
But as I moved into the studio the air changed. Instead of it being the unstable and eerie feeling I felt in the beginning it changed into heaviness. A heaviness that seemed to weigh down my entire body and keep me planted in place to suffer from the horrendous pieces of artwork that screamed to my soul, "Why did Lucy do this to us!?"
There she was watching me as my reactions played out in front of her. First my disbelief she saw, then my shock, and finally my horror. I wanted to speak but couldn't. Our eyes were locked into a stare down that would tickle any cat pink. She broke eye contact first and continued with her horrendous paintings and sculptures. She played me for a fool none of her artwork would sell. For all her buyers were here, frozen by her presence to suffer along with her.
