therapy

» melted art

We entered the craft store with an essence of bubbling childlike happiness tingling in our bones.

"Ready to take all of the things that have troubled you and turn them into absolutely amazing masterpieces?" She almost jumped up as she let the words escape her mouth, riding out on a single breath.

"Well, considering my oh-so-amazing art skills..." I hesitated as she ran over to the utensils aisle.

"Aw, don't be like that. Even a person who genuinely lacks art skills can make a masterpiece with this. First, we need one thousand crayons." She stepped onto a tiny step-stool and picked up a giant box of 'jumbo crayons' and slowly handed it to me. "Next, a canvas... Do you want a black one or a white one? Ah, you know what? Let's get ten. We are going to go crazy and we're not—" she pointed her finger to me, narrowing her eyes, "going to regret it."

She toppled all of the canvases on the box of crayons, all while stifling a laugh as she watched the pile grow and grow—covering my worried face. "Next, a glue gun. There it is! Oh, and..stencils! Yes, extremely important."

After a long half an hour of picking stencils, we went home and set up the project. We glued the crayons onto the canvases with the colors we were going to melt. I lined different shades of blue along the bottom border of a black canvas. I saw her cut out a stencil of a girl flying. She glued the stencil on another black canvas, held a cup over the stencil, and choose different colors of purple, blue, pink, and even gray. She glued her crayons on the top border. Then we began melting with a hairdryer, but we made sure to have the floor completely coated with newspapers. Slowly, the crayons melted and formed beautiful streaks of color.

Mine: the waves of the ocean swirled with thousands of colors. Hers: the night sky sprinkled pastel raindrops.

"What's yours representing?" She curiously asked.

"How my sadness has impacted me and somehow manifested traits inside me that are beneficial. For example, my trust has wavered so I don't allow people to easily get to me. I'm a little more secure after being torn apart too many times. It might look like I'm trapped in this ocean, with nowhere to go, just stuck in swirls of blues. In reality, each color represents another day where I didn't let my sadness overcome my twenty-four hours."

"That's a ton of swirls. You must be happy lately?"

"Yeah, thanks for helping me draw these swirls. And what's yours about?"

"How my feelings beat me down but I'm still flying through them. See how the raindrops down her back?" She pointed to the stencil. "Yeah, well, it's kind of like—how my hardships have burdened my back. But I'm still surviving."

"That's beautiful."