Beyond Love

What we cannot see

"Giselle, what are you drawing?"

The girl looked up from her art; the back of a piece of scrap paper that had a spiral printed on it, handed out by the teacher during the lesson.

"A ship."

She was fourteen. Her brother had just sent her to a new school in the city they had moved into. After...

After that.

"Ooh! It looks amazing. How do you draw so well? Even I can't do that."

She could tell from her voice that the person talking to her was a female. Perhaps not too much older than her—an assistant, perhaps?

"Imagine," Giselle felt for the edges of the paper, as though she was trying to cover its content with her hands.

"Is there a story?"

"Story?"

"There are many ships. Oh, and those look like planets. And puffy smoke coming out of them," The assistant sounded a little silly to herself, and Giselle almost laughed.

"It's a war."

"Oh...so those are bombs?"

"Yeah."

"Then...the planets?"

"That's the moon."

"Woah...where did you learn to draw all this?"

Giselle shrugged.

She really didn't know.

She didn't know how someone could learn from imagination—it wasn't really learning, was it? Learning...she supposed would be what they were doing now, in this boring art class that she had bugged her brother to sign her up for ever since she entered the school.

She didn't know that it would be so boring.

The class was tasked to draw small boats—exactly like the ones on the whiteboard—around this printed spiral on paper.

Giselle could tell that someone had poked holes on hers just to ensure that she followed the spiral correctly.

They showed her how to draw the boat. It was a sailboat.

One big triangle at the top, a line in the middle, and a rectangle for the part humans sat in.

It was easy.

Simple.

Why were fourteen-year-olds doing this?

"Giselle, what is that?" She heard a voice.

It was masculine. Mr. Lee, then?

The one who went on, really, like a broken recorder—don't be naughty, don't be bad. Be good; are you a good girl? Behave yourself.