Artsy Fartsy

Ever since The Incident, I've had good days and bad days. On the good days, I talk and laugh, and am just about downright cheerful. On the bad days, I sulk, and don't talk, and sit in the corner with my iPod plugged into my ears, cranked up as loud as I can stand it. Yes, this was definitly a bad day.
Generally, I avoid the art building. The only reason that I went was for my art class, even though our teacher encouraged us to come by and paint or draw whenever we wanted. After the Incident, I remembered that Grant took classes there and that Maria, our mutual friend, often showed up if she has free time. Today, though, I feel like I am about to bust apart at the seams, like a rag doll that has been loves by multiple generations and is now one squeeze away from falling to pieces. Keeping emotions inide has never been my strong suit, and today is no different.
Tying back my hair, I slip one of the oversized white tunics in the supply closet over my tank top. Other kids are beginning to stumble in, finding places for thier coffee and phones. Most were sketching, a few using charcoal. As far as I could tell, I was the only one getting ready to paint.
I start with a heart, anatomically correct, sketched larger than life in the middle of the paper. Aorta, ventricles, veins popping through the surface pumping blood everywhere in the body. My sketch doesn't take long, but when I stand in front of the paints cabinet, I am completely stumped. How do you color anger, rage and pain? Red, of course, a rich, dark red reminiscent of Alabama red clay. Black, purple that seems to be just a slight shimmer above black. Dark yellow-brown, the color of a healing bruise.
I put down the yellow first, to contour the edges, the purple lining the arteries leading out of the body. The organ itself is black- as black as a tar pit, as the pictures of a smoker's lung that they show you in the Drug Bus when you're a little kid. I was busy mixing up a dark red, the darkest red that you could achieve before too much black muddied it, when Mrs. Cordanza comes up behind me.
"Well," she says, stroking her chin thoughtfully, "I've seen many broken hearts in my time. But none have been quite so...intricate."
"It's not broken. Not really. It's more bruised. Beat up." I trace a finger along the edge, the purple and yellow. "It's almost broken, to the point that it's questionable if it's even functional."
"Oh." she utters, stepping back slightly, thrown of by the emotion in my voice. She places a hand on my shoulder, "There's a lot of passion in this, Cecillia. But there's a lot of pain, too. If you ever need to talk, know that my office door is always open."
Talk? I think later as I slam out of the building, Social Distortion drowning out the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears. Is that all that people want to do now? Doesn't anybody realize that talk does nothing to make life better? Look at Val: us talking has possibly put her into an even worse situation with Grant. And, of course, talking had done nothing for Maria and I; but, I guess that talking to a person who doesn't want to listen doesn't count.
There have been very few girls in my life that I have really gotten close to: Maggie in high school and Maria when I got to college. For whatever reason, I never fit in well with girls: maybe because I wasn't all that interested in clothes and shoes, or being a ditz around boys, or playing games and starting up drama
Maria was one of the first girls that I met in college. If you ask either of us now, I'm sure that neither of us would remember how we met or who introduced us. It is almost like one day I'm hanging out with Kent and Mose and, poof, the next Maria and I are joined at the hip. We talked about everything, gave each other advice, and drooled over cute guys.
I don't Maria for introducing me to Grant. I don't even really blame her for pushing the two of us to get together. She was, after all, my best friend and his self-proclaimed big sister; she just did what she thought would work out the best for the both of us. At first, she just had the two of us, her, and her boyfriend Kyle, hanging out in the Rec Center. She had him invite me to go to lunch with him and, after he expressed an interest in me, gave him my number. It was a disaster waiting to happen, though; he was nineteen and lonely, stil pinning over a girl who didn't care about him at all; I was eighteen, naive, and thinking that my best friend was just looking out for me. It seemed from the start that we were destined to fail.
While Grant and I were dating, Maria was fairly wrapped up in Kyle, so it's possible that she just didn't notice what was going on. It's also possible that it's easier to have two couples hang out and, since both she and Grants lived in the dorms and saw each other all the time, I became the throw-away friend. Whatever the reasoning, though, the outcome was the same: after the breakup, calls and texts from her became less frequent, and we stopped hanging out.
After that, I started drinking. Heavily. It was, to me, an easy way to numb the pain, and God knows that I needed to be numb. I feel too much, and everything was hitting me like a wrecking ball in the stomach. The alcohol got me out of my head, made it possible not to feel the pain, even if only for a little while. There was a short time that I delusionally believed that I could talk to her, and tell her what had really gone on, but that time passed quickly.