Writing Art

I've never been an artist. When I hold a brush the most delicate maneuver I can execute is slapping paint onto houses, which I accomplish with considerable finesse, including the preliminary stages of washing, scraping, and priming. But I always wanted to create landscapes and portraits. I drew a waterfall once in fourth grade and thought it was very good, because in the water I drew little lines that meant the water was moving, and I made it narrow in parts which meant it was going faster, and where it plunged over the cliff I drew blurry rocks to show that the water was clear. The rocks looked kind of like the science-book renditions of amoebas, but I never thought of that until I looked at the picture a while later. That waterfall was the crowning achievement of my art career, until I became an APA who had to put up clever announcement-type things every week for study break.

I was taking notes in class a few weeks ago and glanced at the notebook of the friend seated next to me. The margins of his book were covered in sketches and patterns, doodles. His notes were scrawled on the main body of the page carelessly. The most interesting part of the page was the Starbucks logo he had copied from Vic's coffee cup. I looked at my own notes. I do not draw in class when I am absentminded, I copy song lyrics. I amuse myself by breaking up the lines in different places, to see how the change in rhythm affects the meaning of the words. I make my handwriting as flowing and pretty as I can, or as ragged and drifting, depending on the song.

Yesterday I remembered my waterfall and laughed at my artistic attempts, and thought about my notebook, and realized that I am an artist. The alphabet is art for me. I make pictures with letters, with the shape of my cursive and the slant of my words. They are pretty, swooping and full of curls and loops, like birds chasing each other across a big blank sky. My landscape is college-ruled and has pink lines denoting margins. My canvas is lined with blue and my brush is pointy and hard.

I cannot draw a face, but I can write one. My picture is made up of a thousand words, or fifty. When I feel extravagant I fling open the doors of the vault that is the English lexicon, and glory in the treasure within. Here are color, tint, shade, hue; here is action; here is rest. Here weapons of war may double as instruments of peace. And here, buried, am I, something beneath the words, expressed by them, yet always unsaid.
I sit within, sifting through the stores with open fingers, watching keen-eyed as the right ones catch and stay, aligning and re-aligning themselves, telling secrets. Stories that never start and never end, poetry without motion, music with a noteless tune.