Muse [18+] • REVISING

42 | Soul

V E R A

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The first time I walked the streets of Paris, I was looking for a part of me.

Something I wouldn't find back in California, in the shelter of my little town, one that's only crowded by predictability. Something fresh, new, and exciting, maybe even overwhelming. I was the kind of kid that wanted to be kicked into this world, not coddled.

I craved a life that hadn't been clouded by the ideas of my parents, and the lives they wished they lived versus the ones they did. I knew what it meant to sacrifice, I had watched the definition of it ever since I was brought into this world, but that didn't mean I had to learn how to regret too. Because just like the majority of people on this earth, just like my parents, my regret was in the shape of everything I didn't do.

I always pursued something, even if I knew I'd only be invested for the time being, and I realized early on in my life that everything I ever did was like the butterfly effect.

If I didn't quit dancing when I was six because I was much shorter, unable to contort my body in ways the other girls could, I wouldn't have found soccer, something I ended up playing for six years after and had me wanting to go pro. But then, if I hadn't been benched the majority of every season, I wouldn't have finally called it quits when I was twelve, and I wouldn't have spent my afternoons at the library waiting for mother to pick me up. That led me to checking out the maximum number of books you could at a time, just so I could learn how to write and become a published author one day because seeing all of the other kids my age getting lost in different combinations of twenty-six letters had me intrigued.

Of course, a few months later, I stopped going to the library due to both of my parents picking up extra shifts at work, and I had to start walking home. I'm sure late fees are collecting on all of the books I probably still haven't returned to this day.

Quit, quit, quit. It seemed like a bad habit of mine, to give up, as most would say. And then I'd always ask myself, wouldn't I be a bigger fool if I stayed? If I clung to something that didn't make sense? Something that wasn't my world? Dancing, soccer, writing, all had the same thing in common. They didn't bring me to life in the way that I needed.

Then, I was finally eighteen, taking an art history class I believed was nothing more than an extra credit for me. Down the line, I was sure it'd fizzle, just like everything else, because that's what Vera does, she jumps ship, riding out a new wave as quickly as she can.

Until that one afternoon, when I chose to stay a few minutes later after class, because of a tedious formal analysis on Paul Gauguin, a French artist whose work I couldn't connect to, presented itself as an opportunity for me to do something I normally didn't do. To speak up, and challenge for change, rather than walk away from it.

I remember that day as if I had just lived it, my professor looking at me like I was a newborn and had just said my first words. I expected her to hand me back the packet of requirements, forcing me to write a paper on a man whose entire life was dedicated to fetishizing women, but instead, she sat me down, she looked me straight in the eyes, and simply asked: What do you want to do?

She lent me a textbook, giving me the next week to find a new focal point, and come back to her with an honest reason on why I wanted to pursue something different than what she had assigned me. That was when Raimondi's I Modi fell into my lap, the surviving pieces of his work, a collection of raw depictions on the essence of physicality. I spent that entire week, hulled up in the library every night, getting lost in the taboo artform, feeling like there was finally something that brought me to life.