SMELLING ROSES

Chapter Eight

When I was in middle school, I had an art teacher by the name of Mr. Fisher. He was dark-skinned, tall, and as my mother would say, "had a face full of character." He was one of those teachers you'd hope for. With some teachers, you could tell they took on more than they could handle and had given up on making an impact. But he wasn't like that. He loved his job, and it showed.

On our first day, he told us by being in his classroom, we would have to live by his rules. And he lived by three simple principles:

You are not the canvas, but the painter.

You are not the paint absorbed into the cloth, because you hold the paintbrush.

Do not allow another painter to paint on your canvas, because only you should.

He knew it was impossible to be the painting and the painter at the same time, and at some point, you'd either surrender or conquer one of them.

Of course, most of us thought it was a dramatic way of saying "don't cheat in my class," but over the course of a semester, he changed the way I looked at art. In fact, he was the very reason I got into animation. It would be years before I found the art form, but the fact remained. To make something out of nothing. To have control over the narrative I created. It felt almost superhuman to take a simple, insignificant thought and make it into something. Art was about making something out of nothing. Watching an idea become more than you imagined.

If you look up the definition of become, it's defined in three words:

Begin to be.

It's funny because it sounds like a command. As if to say something isn't being right now in this moment. You have to get up and start to exist. But some of us don't look at life in that way. We see ourselves as painters, creating moments, memories, atmospheres, even confrontations. We don't think about creating ourselves, because we already exist. And to become someone would imply we weren't someone before.

But that's the thing about fresh starts, you can't erase your past, the image someone else painted for you. You can, however, take the paintbrush from them, and paint over it. And to capture the beauty of the end result takes planning and intention. Because while it's hard to create something out of nothing, it holds little to the courage you must have to create something, despite of what's already there.

I was approaching the moment where Mr. Fisher's words made complete sense. And as much as I wanted to, life wouldn't allow me to ignore them. I had a canvas full of colors painted with me in mind, but I wasn't holding the brush. I never had been. Family comes first. A principle my father lived by, and one I grew up always believing. But now, I came first. Not by choice, or by some call to action, but because my father decided for me.

To go from living for my family to surviving for myself, was lonely. But Wren never left my side.

His mustang bolted down the empty road with open fields on either side. It was The Golden Hour. The reddened sun shined through the high grass and evergreens. Though I loved Mrs. Davidson, I wasn't in a rush to get to her place. It smelled like mothballs, cornstarch, and loneliness. The walls creaked, dust collected in the pages of all her books, and I would be forced to watch her stories until she finally gave up the television for sleep.

What I needed was a distraction.

The image of my father's eyes was embedded into my mind like a permanent mark of demarcation. His last words pummeled my mind to its barest functions. I wanted to cry. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to not exist. My life was pried from my bare hands and now I had nothing.

"We're here." Wren peeked from the rim of his shades, pulling to the side of the road. I saw a carpet of yellow in its reflection and I canned my neck out the window.