Tell me all your secrets. I want to feel you.

Boys...they can see color in everything right?

They can hear colors.

Why is no one else interested in this? This might be the most intimate way to get to know a boy.

The idea that my mind might get cramped by stupid shit as trivial as the past disgusts me.

I wish that wedding over the summer had been more fun. I wanted to hide my shoes behind one of the giant decorative pot plants with my little sister and run around looking in all the banquet halls and pretending they were our secret clubhouse.

She's too old now apparently.

At 13.

What was I doing at this age? Besides that?

Running around with all the little kids playing hide and seek tag. You had to go run through the masses of people- all brown, all encrusted in star covered fabrics you couldn't remember the names of for the life of you- to find whomever's poor parent got picked that night to be base.

My biggest concerns used to be trying to steal an extra slice of cake and coming up with lies to feed my parents about the absence of friends in my life and not missing Digimon (RIGHTAFTERSCHOOLMOMWEHAVETOGOSTRAIGHTHOMENOWORELSE) and reading the dictionary before bed.

I spent too much time in the library now that I think about it. Working there, sitting there, volunteering there, half-living there.

The smell of the dust on the dust-jackets ("wipe it off"), cheap ink on the older paperbacks ("be careful they're ancient"), mindlessly alphabetizing everywhere ("These are JFic not Reference"), dodging between shelves pretending you were Indiana Jones (Encyclopedia shelf was the get-a-way plane), renting out tapes to try and teach yourself French ("Je voudrais un bouitille du eau minerale, si vous plait"), seeing the curly haired librarian of 10 years comment each day on how she remembered when "OhmadearyouwereITTTTTTYbittybackthenyepyepyepy'allcomebacknowyaheard?".

!

I figured out what it must be like for people who can draw! They see it as just another part of life and I suppose since they have the skill they just accept it as something as trivial as having teeth in their gums and eyes in their skulls.

It's like that feeling when your mother was asleep that one afternoon and it was sweltering outside so they had you locked inside like a caged monkey. You were four years old, goddammit. You had things to do and places to see and they locked you in the house and left you to it (unless you were one of the respectable ones who escaped from naptime- fuck naptime), suffocating you with those musty off-white walls of your family's first house ("the starter home," my father would say. "We're not going to be in apartment for long" was another line at this stage in life). You'd look at the linoleum floors that your mom worked so hard to keep clean and curl your wretched little grape toes into the cheap synthetic rug of the living room relishing in how the scratchy feeling felt against your perfect baby skin. You'd stand there, all four puny feet of you, and you gaped.

There were no adults. You were somehow magically all alone (I always made it a point to check for fairies at times like these).

You were free.

But you don't stop to relish this moment-no, that would be a waste of your time and you're all about productivity at this age.

A quick pre-cursory glance allows you to take in the uncomfortable rented furniture your mother had so begrudgingly picked out at the Rent-a-Center or the local pawn shop, the shitty TV your dad bought at a yard sale (no cable, shit was expensive), the ugly knick-knacks your grandmother made mommy put up on every available surface...

AND THEN...that's when you see them.

The "oh!" face (the one that fills all your grandmother's ancient picture frames), the hand clap (quiet as burning autumn leaves slapping the pavement), or the shifty look, JUST to make sure you were in the clear (shit's about to go down).

It's that motherfucking green and yellow box. The one with the colors in it.

Your mother would hold them up in your face day after day, saying something important about each one- but you could give less of a shit really- all you knew was that some you liked more than others, some were sad, some were the same color as Dad's tie and some were the same color as your favorite Hotwheels miniature.

MamaMomMommyMummyDaddy'snewsleepoverfriendSharon- whoever- would lay out big squares of imposing white paper on the floor, over that shitty synthetic carpet. The colors wouldn't work properly there and they always got taken away too quickly.

But then you look around at those warm, crumbling off-white walls (dripping with the last minute plasterputty that clung desperately to the edges of the ceiling trying to cover the cancer inducing asbestos the broker assured your father wasn't there) and you know what must be done.

Sheer passion. Sheer energy. Sheer focus.

The box is ripped open, it's contents strewn across the floor, you observe your magnificent canvas. Without any further ceremony, you start grabbing the colors- some would feel the thin paper wraps of the crayons growing hot in their chubby fists, others' skin would sweat against the thinly lacquered wood of the pencils, and- if you were the king of kings and struck the absolute jackpot that glorious, spectacular afternoon- you were lucky enough to feel the chubby plastic markers slipping between your fingers as you grew tired of standing on your dinner roll sized feet.

But finally,

FINALLY-

there it was.

Your masterpiece.

Unabashedly streaked across the walls the color of off milk.

Beautiful, unreserved, pure imagination.

It simply was what it was,

the most glorious undertaking of that particular day (You had really only lived so many days, you see).

And with that short burst of approval at what you had accomplished (some were not so lucky, their masterpieces ended with shocked gasps somewhere three feet above them, coming out of the bedroom at exactly the wrong moment), you moved on to the next thing.

That's what I think it must feel like for people who can actually draw. There's no recognition of it as art. It's just a natural flow of desiring to create, creating, and then moving on.

WELL I'M JEALOUS.

AND EXHAUSTED.

AND SO SO anxious.