Green Tea Parties and Lilies: A Collection of Rather Assorted Poetry

My Favorite Classroom

My favorite classroom, the art room.

It's a bit strange and asymmetrical and everything smells like paint and paste. 

But that's what I love about it.

The way it never stays the same. The constant changing of projects on the walls, new ones appearing with new perspectives and old ones disappearing to their creators' home as a memory captured on a canvas. Painted bricks with people's memories of that room, the laughter they shared with their friends, the style that they've discovered while experimenting with charcoal and pigments, their favorite childhood characters now immortalized on a concrete square. Objects like bottles of colored water and candles sitting upon tabletops where students spend hours with dirty fingers and wooden pencils sketching the curves, the angles, the shine, the shadows of each particular thing. The various tools scattered throughout the room; brushes with dried paint still in the bristles like the remnants of someone's most recent genius idea. Markers with the ink slowly becoming dry but people still using them because they "just have to finish this one thing" and there's no other color that portrays the same feeling that that particular one does. Graphite sticks, chalk, and charcoal covering the creamy surfaces of illustration board as someone uses this collection of minerals and lines to create something that gives it a meaning. Old books that have had their pages torn out and ripped up in order to create something brand new and abandoned art projects being repurposed to make a new project seem a little more unique. Paint splatters, hot glue clumps, and ink blots cover the tables and stools; some have even gone to the liberty of making a masterpiece on the seat because it seemed a little too empty to belong. Half finished projects hang off the walls like flower petals, waiting to be picked back up and resumed, the artists breathing some life into the paper that once was a blank slate but now is evolving into something incredible; maybe it'll turn into a birthday gift, a Christmas or Hanukkah present, a love letter, an award-winning work, or something that could change a life. 

Or save one.

This is why I love the art room, not because it is familiar and accepting, but because it is a source of adventure, every day becoming a new possibility for something new to happen. 

Something different. 

And it reminds me that it's okay to be different and to continue to change and evolve as a person because simple monotony is boring. It's okay to change to keep things interesting and new to keep life spicy and full of adventure. It's okay to diversify, to modify, to transfigure.

Just like the art room.