6. Chalk
He knew it was the first time because he was quite bad at it.
His pulse was too shaky, his patience fragile, his understanding of proportions nonexistent.
Whose hair?
His canvas was limited to the shadow cast by his body.
His subject, just as limited by the lack of concrete details in his head.
He'd been hollowed out. Not even reborn, he'd been broken and poorly repaired.
Had he ever truly died? Had his old life ended, in any way? Otherwise, why would he feel so haunted by that which could never be restored?
No. No more questions.
He wouldn't be a rock.
He wouldn't let any more whispers, or images, or colors blow past him.
I was a thief, and still am. A damn good one. Yeah.
As a result of these questions, however, he felt progressively incomplete, and depressed, despite his best attempts to bury them. And drawing helped him immensely.
Even if, again, he wasn't any good.
Whose hair is this?
The red was too bright. It wouldn't do. But then again, that wasn't his fault. This was the only color he had.
The fingers on the hand made no sense.
The curve of the cheek resembled crooked teeth.
Even the circumference of the moon proved difficult to get right.
Whose hand?
Peter Lake did his best.
And so, he completed the first of many recreations of the one image he'd somehow maintained, strange and fleeting as it was.
The outline of lost things through his eyelids while he blinked. The symbol haunting his dreams.
Who are you?
A small doodle. An amorphous head of too-bright red hair, reaching out to an uncanny moon with a flat, gelatinous hand.
Who… Oh.
This wasn't 'the warmth.' Then again, it wasn't the alternative, either.
This was a portrait of nothing at all. Just the clumsy scribble of a madman in a fog.
Peter Lake groaned and got to his feet, his face warm with embarrassment, and he walked away briskly. The red chalk had smeared his fingers, there was now colorful dust under his nails.
My hands are dirty…
He'd been a thief in his lost life. A very good thief, too, from what he'd figured.
I'm a thief, and I'm a damn good one.
But he still needed to learn a lot about stealing.
He needed to learn how to steal thoughts and dreams, and repurpose them into images.
How to grab at colors and shapes and recreate them from memory. No, not memory, memory was a privilege he didn't possess. From flashes of memory.
From whispers. From the rustling of the tide.
From warmth.
I fear opening my eyes and discovering you were never here at all…
He knew, then, that this was the best chance he had. If the fog wouldn't unveil the city and let him reconstruct his past, he'd rebuild his story himself, piece by piece, scrawl by scrawl.
He needed to tie most whispers to shapes and forms. Everything he now had, as little as it was, was too abstract for him to make solid into an ugly chalk drawing.
Everything, that is, except the little red-haired girl with her hand to the moon.
That was the best bet he had. The most immediate way forward. And to properly whet his memory, he'd need to learn to draw her.
So he practiced as often as he wished. He literally had nothing else to do.
He wasn't good, so he leaned into poor lighting to shield his eyes from his own scrawls, to bring him the proper confidence to complete each doodle. His shadow, the moonlight, the thickening grey clouds, corrupting the white mist.
He'd wait till nightfall, most times, and then surrender to his lapses of creativity.
I was a thief. I'm still a thief.
The curve of the skull was rounder than the curve of the moon.
The hair was too sharp at the edges. The shoulder spiked up too sharply.
The hand still looked… wrong.
I knew warmth. This isn't warmth.
Again. He tried again.
And again.
But it is something.
This one. This time, he'd get it right.
The head looked better now. He'd found that adding a light shading of red to the outline of the moon added quite a lot.
The side of the cheek looked better, too.
The hand was just as horrific, but the way it connected to the arm, to the shoulder, made sense. It made sense.
He was proud of this one. The first of his myriad of attempts that provoked legitimate pride.
That is, he was proud for a while, until he wasn't.
Because the longer he looked, the more time passed, the more nights he spent seeing that little stranger in his mind, the less he recognized what he saw. The more flaws he detected.
That wouldn't do. That wasn't it. He couldn't reference this, solidify it into a recovered piece…
O Come…
And so… he tried again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
O Come, O Come…
His canvas expanded as he became desperate. Maybe a larger frame would help him.
And it did. Until it didn't.
And it did, until it didn't.
O Come… Something… Anything…
Until-
Snap!
His nails grazed the concrete. And the chalk, now reduced to a stone of red dust between his fingers, cracked in half like a small egg.
And he left his best drawing to date unfinished, as a result.
And he lingered, quietly, on his knees, before it.
Ba-dum… Ba-dum…
When he looked at the broken chalk, its once-sharp outlines softened by use, its size withered, he remembered egg shells and the smell of tea.
I have some boiled eggs, they're cold so–
So…
This was another whisper from 'the warmth'.
This was a broken piece of red chalk in his hand.
Ba-dum…
He wasn't even mad. He was too tired to be so.
Drawing had relaxed him, become his key out of the fog, until it, too, had festered into obsession, his hunger for clarity corrupting his strategy and making it mayhem.
And Peter Lake found deja vu in the situation he was in. He related it to his search of names in the graveyard. One that had ended in him lain down beside a tomb, gasping for air, burning up a fever.
O Come, please…
His strategies had changed, his resolve had strengthened, he'd grown wiser… but one vital thing remained. Peter Lake was desperate.
And desperation would only thicken the fog and bring him more pain.
The gravedigger wasn't coming back. No one would laugh off his attitude or scold him for it.
So he told himself to calm down.
He told himself to rest. When he dreamed he paid no attention to the red-haired girl with her hand to the moon.
He told himself there was time.
We have time. We have time to talk about everything.
He meandered the fog a little more. Caught more whispers and weaved them into his clothes.
So talk slowly…
When he found another piece of chalk, he made sure this one lasted more than the previous one.
And he tried again.
And again.
And again…
Talk slowly…
Author's Note: To anyone who is here today, thank you for reading.
This is by far one of my most personal chapters to date. I definitely related Peter's obsession with drawing the red-haired girl to my own relationship to my art, and how its therapeudic elements have helped me in the past during hard times - only for me to become too reliant on it during hard times, and therefore, for these elements to become harmful. Obsession is never a good thing, let me tell you.
To me, drawing has always been my safe space, and during the time where my family was suffering a lot from our return to our country and my brother's situation, I developed my speed as an artist significantly mostly because... that was all I did XD And I still do it a lot. My passion hasn't burned out, in fact I keep learning more and more ways to expand my drawing skills to, for instance, other techniques and styles, other brushes, ways to animate, and loving what I do more and more. I am in a 2d animation major for a reason, my job is going to depend on my passion for drawing for pleasure XD
But a passion and an obsession are two very different things, though the line that separates them is quite thin, and I have definitely toed it a couple times - and I have experienced the exhaustion and frustration I make Peter feel here, when he keeps trying to draw the same person over and over and over again to fix the situation he's in, and it just won't do.
At times I still find myself worn down from drawing too much without really realizing it - animating is a whole other and more laborious task and I have been animating for fun a lot lately and it is exhausting, I need to learn when to take breaks in the same way I learned to take breaks from drawing XD -, or beating myself up for not being truthful to a character's proportions (ironically, this has happened to me the most with how I draw Peter Lake and how much I've changed the way I draw him overtime) but I've learned to trust my instincts and let myself evolve, rather than relying on desperation for control. And I certainly recognize that I can't stay locked in a room forever, that my life isn't reduced to this.
I have long stopped seeing either my art or my writings as my escape, rather as a constant companion. I can draw and write whenever I want, but I don't need to. That is reflected in how I wrote this whole chapter :3 I did need to explain why writing this chapter was so significant to me.
As always, here's your hug *hug*, see you next time!