Ascend

~1~

I stepped back to look at the painting I had just finished, my eyes scanning for flaws or smudges I could have made, finding flaws only small enough to be ignored by anyone other than myself.

I took a deep breath and leaned back against my paint splattered closet doors, the dull light of my small closet not giving the painting any justice. It was one of my better works... I could already tell...

Lightly colored swallows in the shades of pinks and creams and yellows flew and dived across the baby blue sky while white, fluffy clouds floated across the picture. Flowers twirled up from the ground in bright reds and clean whites and maroons; they were a pain to paint. The dull green of the grass reminded me of summers at my grandparents', the smell of their garden one of the best smells the world had to offer, in my opinion. Trees loomed over it all, also being a pain to paint. Their bright green leaves touched the boring, white ceiling; my next project.

    Black, cursive writing in my own hand flowed across the middle of the picture, telling me one of the most important things to remember at this point in time:

    "Freedom is a state of mind."

    I repeated those six words in my head, my eyes quickly taking in the entirety of the painting. After I took one more deep breath, I turned and threw the closet doors open before spinning back to face the picture and staggering backward to stand in the bright, yellow light of my bare room, the paint chipping from the walls a terrible sight. But the picture in my closet looked so much cleaner and brighter now that the old, dirty windows lined up to my right let in the light that the noon sun had to offer.

    After standing there for a few moments, appreciating my week-long project, I looked down at myself, finding my front smeared with the same paints as the ones on the wall. The paint was splattered on my faded jeans and T-shirt, telling me that I should have worn something else. My hands were unsurprisingly smeared with paint and my tan and freckled skin was now a mix of the pastel paints used throughout the week. Somehow, though, I managed to do the same thing to my bare feet...

    I wriggled my toes and looked down at the dried smears. Apparently, I needed a shower.

    A sigh left me as I dreaded the thought of leaving my room. I needed to paint and it was not a want with a room like this. There was so much potential in those three bare walls and those window sills that were covered in dust and dead bugs... I was determined to reach that potential.

    The springs creaked in my old, twin-sized bed as I sat down, my gaze shifting from the scene in my closet to the city outside my windows. It always smelled of overpopulation and pollution. I wasn't quite sure if I liked it or not.

    This was a city for artists. Not my kind of artist, though.

    Photographers and musicians and poets ran the streets with their dyed hair and giant boots and ruined clothes. They were what you'd see in your mind's eyes when the phrase 'broken/ angsty teenager' was ever brought up or thought of.

    But I didn't dress or act like that and I truly was a 'broken teenager' despite losing both of my parents to a two-ton trap of metal- a car crash for all of those that didn't understand my bitter explanation of it.

I still kept my dusty brown hair in need of a cutting, I kept my t-shirts that each had a specific color that I was able to as name to the exact shade of like the mustard colored one I had on at the moment. I kept my jeans that were faded shades of blue and I kept my ratty, black Converse that I had had for four years. I didn't need green hair or my shirts to be made with holes in them, I didn't need boots that would surely give me blisters and I didn't need a 'pity me' attitude.

I expressed myself through my art. I didn't whine like the musicians and the poets or take pictures of cemeteries or twisted trees like the photographers. People like me weren't very common in this town. People like me really weren't common anywhere...

**The opinions of the main character do not match my own. I do not think that every type of artist is the cliche mentioned above.**