I learned to draw on Gallifrey.
Where was it? Can't remember now. Ireland, maybe. Irish sort of name. I couldn't point it out now on a map. It's one of those places that exists on the line between dream and memory, an image from long ago that never ceases to haunt you but that you're never sure was real, an echo of childhood when everything was breathtakingly vivid in a way that adulthood never is.
But I remember a sunsrise. Silver turned to gold in the mornings, and the wind was warm, and the colors were so glorious and strange. And there was a smell . . . I try to think of it now, but it dances away. If ever I smell it again, I'll know. I remember that morning when I sat, pencil in hand and sketchbook on my knees, and took my tongue between my teeth and drew. It's all in shades of gray now: little graphite lines. But I captured the shapes of the hills and the shadows of the silver trees, a whole magnificent world that somehow became mine when I pressed it into the page. When I see the sun rise here it reminds me, not of the place, but of the drawing. The link between that place and this one, so fragile. But it was powerful somehow. The sunrise was gone in an instant but the paper stayed forever.
I was never quite satisfied with the picture. Always something was off. The perspective. The shadows. The shapes. I pored over the sketches for hours, erasing and redrawing, trying to make it perfect and it never, ever was. But when I stepped back, I found it didn't matter. The picture made me think of the hills of Gallifrey, and that was all that was important.
I don't know if it was real. I know the sky is not burnt-orange; I know the trees are not silver. There can be no such hill, in Ireland or anywhere else.
But somewhere, somehow, sometime, I learned how to draw.
I learned to love in England.
It's all such a blur, really. But the memory is so vivid, like those dreams that you never really wake up from, even when it's eleven o'clock in the morning and you've had coffee and conducted yourself sensibly in company for hours. It's still there, at the back of your mind, more real than the coffee, whispering to you, calling you back.
It was mad, and ordinary, and terrifying, and wonderful. Intense on a whole different spectrum. I remember sitting on a sofa with my heart going wild inside my chest, praying she couldn't hear it, more terrified of a widowed school matron named Joan than I'd ever been terrified of anything in that life or any other. But I kissed her, and the whole universe melted away. Like a dream. Like it never was. And that mad ticking of time sliding by, the dizzying swirl of the universe, the constant and chaotic awareness of everything that I live with every minute of every day, just wasn't. There was only, only Joan. And she loved me.
That was forever, right there. She loved me; I loved her. In that one heady instant we were married, and had four children . . . I tried to cook her breakfast when she was sick and set the oven on fire . . . our oldest boy won the school spelling contest and was over the moon for a week . . . and Joan brushed Betsy's veil aside to kiss her congratulations . . . and we sat together by the fire in the evening and talked, though after so many years who knew how we kept finding things to talk about . . . and I knew I was dying, but she'd follow me soon, and all was well in our tiny, wonderful world . . . and the kiss was over, and I'd learned how to love, and done it perfectly on my very first try.
I can't quite believe that it was real. I know that I have always been lonely, and always will be; I know that all things die and I go on. I never loved anyone named Joan. I can't love. Not like that.
And yet there is a drawing in my sketchbook, my pencil strokes forming the face of a beautiful, wonderful woman. And I can see love in every gray graphite line. It wasn't real, but somewhere, somehow, sometime, I learned to love.
And I will always remember how to draw.