The margins filled with small sketches, I remembered by letting the pen move free. Art class held my attention and I chose to sketch what was in my head. Sketching the contents of my head didn’t come easy and I chased it throughout my high school career into my college one.

While studying art, I found a position as a barista. Working the bar came easy and I loved it. Easy interactions with the customers gave me great joy. To stand and talk was easy and I loved it. When the customer laughed and we shared a smile: it didn’t matter whether I understood chiaroscuro or color theory. I enjoyed it until the day I did not.

That day came after a session in my studio. My hands had red paint under and on my fingernails. Two tufts of hair poked out of my head like antennae. Claws appeared on my hands when I pinched my fore finger and thumb around the key to unlock the front door. Lobster-like when I scurried from the back to the register, I knocked over a drink sitting on the pickup bar. The sales floor was the bottom of the Pacific. Frigid in reacting, I drifted in the current of people and drinks and thoughts. Fluorescent lighting gave a cerulean hue over the counter and my hands burned bright red with the paint. My exoskeleton, caked with espresso grinds, had formed like all small crustaceans’ do. Without observation I busted through it: one day content and the next day a reverse Kafka-like metamorphosis.

I began painting as a result of the metamorphosis. My smile waned at the register and I sketched on the backs of receipts. I wasn’t there. The vision in my head that began as a sketch would flood with color, saturating and swelling and I’d lose sight of it. The fleeting thoughts were my younger brother in the field. I’d take him with me and he’d run off the trail out of sight. My heart pounded with quick pitter-pattered beats: I told Ma I’d watch after him. All senses on high alert: The smell of grass moist then sun scorched, the crunch on a dirt path under foot, the circling hawk casting shadow flicker. My brother darts through the crisp ochre colored grass. I convince myself he will come back; he had to come back. One foot in front of the other, methodical in my journey towards finding him again, finding the vision of my art again.

I became better at realizing the vision in my head and then became worse at it. It was the carrot in front of the horse, the matador’s red cape in front of the bull. I ate popcorn while watching a documentary at my grandmother Yaya’s house about matadors. The thin matador in his extravagant bright teal satin traje de luces and rose pink socks walked into the middle of the ring. His red cape, the muleta, at his side began to make graceful passes, veronicas, stoic whilst watching the bull. In appeasement of the crowd, he goaded the bull to pass through the flickering red muleta. The bull, with eyes red and hating the red flicking muleta, charged. A last second razor flick from the horn sent the matador into the air. My thumb soft over the veins of Yaya’s frail hand, I smiled at her que peligroso, no? The blood of the matador spilled in the ring, crouched low as the aids rushed to distract the bull. The blood soaked into the teal suit and muddled it, the complementary colors vibrating against the soft yellow sand around him.

After watching the soft yellow taint red, I wanted to practice painting a vermillion vase. I began with the basic shapes and then filled it in with gradual steps. Taking my eyes off the piece, it finished quick and disproportionate. I learned to break this amateur habit 4 years back when my professor chimed in my ear to keep my head up. After the professor walked past my station, I cursed and knocked over the drawing easel. Sitting on the curb, I’m furious. The setting sun splashed violet against a red-orange and I remembered feeling alone.

The studio was silent, broken only by the lone scratch of the brush on the page. I looked at the paper and back at the vase and how it curved and back at my paper and how it didn't curve.

“Look up. LOOK up. LOOK UP. LOOK UP.” Each word producing a shake from my head.

I knew that. I was the bull. I palmed the vase and threw it to the ground. The vase flew from my grip and regret was a rushing warm arrow that pierced my torso. Deep breaths followed a rip and my painting fluttered to the ground. Retrieving the broom, I swept the pieces into the white chipped pan. A sliver of red ceramic cut my finger. The blood dripped silent onto the concrete. It hadn’t come easy and I hated everything I had chosen to become. Staring at my finger drip, it dripped blood and sweat and thoughts and fears and aspirations.

The aspirations ran through my veins and it wasn’t blood I missed when it spilled. I picked what I became in life and it crushed me. It crushed me inside to know that the vision in my head would take nothing more than time to realize and even then time couldn’t heal all failures. They stung like red ceramic cuts on soft artist skin; they sat with you in the shop when you drank your morning coffee. When you pulled out your notebook and began to draw, the thoughts of who you wanted to be plagued who you actually were- you’re never the one in your head. Now in a coffee shop, my notebook invited me in, dared me to try again- I peered up right before beginning and saw another soul sitting 10 feet away.

His elbows sat heavy on the table and his eyes dazed straight ahead. A small pastry wrapped in a brown paper bag, scrunched tight to form around the muffin. It lay on the edge of the wooden surface. His left eye gazed more open than the right. The left one had a red tint on the side of it. The night wore it thin, saturating the white sclera to a warm magenta. He was absent and the world was silent and his mind was loud and he stared ahead. I was thankful I wasn’t him. I was sketching. At least my thoughts weren’t in my head anymore. Perhaps he saw me and was thankful he wasn’t me: thankful that his thoughts never made it out of his head onto the paper. The grass was green where we were; content to never cross the line, to tackle our demons alone in our heads or on our pages.

The ink flowed from my right hand to the notebook pages while my left hand fingered two official white sheets underneath. Ink ceased for a moment when, out of my peripheral, I noticed him stand. He gathered his pastry and coffee the barista had called out. A slow pace with slow moving feet complemented his slow face that scowled when he unwrapped the bag as he drank the hot beverage. A knuckle had a scab on it. His shirt was charcoal grey with the local pub’s insignia on the back: he had the look.

I’d seen the look in the reflection of my blank iPhone screen two years back right before a shift. The pre-shift contemplation of why I still worked while the red-eye-red-knuckle stung. A flash of confidence, an upswing in artistic commissions and I had the courage to leave. I became thankful for not having to have the look, to attempt something for money that was counter to the culture I desired to rebel against.

Except the money didn’t - and hasn’t - come easy. Now I sit here in the shop, fast-forwarded from my two years of flying solo. The tattered wings I built on the way down from my initial leap propped behind me on the wall. Shifting from red-eye to the red-knuckle and then back at my own hands, sore from hours of holding the brush. My back is stiff from painting but I anticipate the different stiffness that comes with standing at a register. I close my notebook and take the two pages to the counter.

Will my face be like his?

Will my pastry taste sweet?

Will I even notice I’m consuming something?

Right now I was present but I knew behind the register I’d be absent. I would be in my studio, cussing out the painting I messed up while picking up pieces of a broken red vase.

 

 

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