(hihihi thank you for readin', vote if you do so wish to and a-thank you)
(i don't play violin or at least not anymore and i know nothing about orchestral music so if i get anything wrong here, no i didn't)
(kidding, but also I have no knowledge in the Japanese language either, i don't even watch anime, and some is used in this chapter that's purely pulled from scouring the internet for the most accurate translations, so if any of it's wrong, pls lmk and don't get mad 😭)
The first thing I ever learned to draw was a frog.
I was four at the time, doodling mindless, senseless shapes on my papers with corner suns and stick figures when my mother found me trying to recreate the same frog from an open storybook on the ground.
She laughed, coming to sit beside me. "What are you drawing, Angel?"
"Frog," I said, face pouted as I drew a figure that was most definitely not a frog, but perhaps something out of a horror movie.
She hummed. "Are you?"
"But it's bad."
"Not 'bad'," she corrected, taking my tiny hands in hers as she put a new green crayon into my fist. "Just...new."
"New," I said.
"Sometimes," she began, pulling me to sit on her lap as she held my hand in here, beginning to draw two circles next to my catastrophe of an amphibian, "when something is new, you have to be bad at it first before you can be good."
"Why?"
She made double arches, smooth and practiced. "Because you have to learn. And you don't learn anything if you're always good at it." She tapped my frog. "You have a good talent, Angel, you know that?"
"Then why is it bad?"
"Talent without practice isn't worth much," she admitted. "That's why you have to take care of it. If you don't take care of talent, you might lose it."
"I don't wanna lose it."
"Then practice." She began to draw the feet, my fingers still curled around the crayon. "If you love it, practice it. Love takes effort."
It was a rather solemn piece of advice for a frog drawing, but like many things with my mother, it wasn't really about the frog at all. And like many things with my mother, I never realized that until too late.
I drew a lot of my time away from then on. Doodles on papers. Graphite in notebooks. My first set of watercolors. My fourth set of pencils. My tenth sketchbook. I would draw my mother, my father. I would draw everything. I would draw everyone.
When my life went to shit later, I didn't draw for a while. Every time I did, it would be a face vaguely like my mom's, a scene from our old house, hands that looked like my father's. Art was my window to my world, but I found after countless ripped up sketches, that I didn't like looking through it anymore.
I didn't stop drawing, but I stopped having any trust in it. I couldn't trust myself to my parents or my uncle, and I couldn't even confide in a piece of paper. I only drew safe things from then on: apples, kids' desks, trees from the park, a cupcake in a bakery window. Things that meant what they said: just things.
My mother had a point. Talent without practice wasn't worth much. One could even argue I never had talent anyway, just hope. Contrary to popular belief, they're not the same.
So I lost some of art, somewhere between the folds of freshman year novelty and eighth grade tragedy. Now it only came in nightmares, and when I was really unlucky, in tsunamis. Where I would draw until I felt like my hand would break and I couldn't even remember what I was drawing.
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Suicide Buddies
Teen Fiction"My mother once told me there are three, and only three, truly defining moments in your life. One: When you don't know. Two: When you realize you don't know. Three: When you know. This is about the third one." --- Angel Young is going to die. Or at...
