With happiness came worry, I suppose.
Another week passed, and I still had nothing finished or even planned for my artwork. I had no ideas; I probably could have just sat in front of a canvas and let my brush do the work, but I didn't think about it then, not when the stress was eating me alive. Finding me when I attempted sleep and tearing at my skin, reappearing every time I felt calm at all and forcing my relaxation to vanish at every chance it got.
Painting had never made me feel like this before, I'd never stood in front of a blank canvas only to have the same emptiness in my mind. I'd never stared at a plain white image for hours, wondering where the inspiration I so desperately needed had gone off to.
I now only had two weeks to finish seven paintings and write about them. School wasn't helping, and preparing for graduation wasn't either. If I didn't even get my paintings done, there was absolutely no chance of winning the scholarship, if there was any chance at all in the first place. What would I do then? Find a different job somewhere and move into a crappy apartment with Phil? Neither of us making enough to fulfill our dream of traveling the world?
Worrying about my entire life plan wasn't helping with the stress of this project, either.
At the moment, I was at Troye's house with Phil, Connor, Tyler, and Louise. We'd driven here after school in Troye's car, and now Phil and Louise were engaging in a game of Mario Kart, while Tyler and Connor ate all of the food in the fridge. I was sitting on the couch with my head in my hands, pretending to listen to whatever Troye was ranting about beside me.
"So I have this song that I'm not even sure I'm happy with. It might become a reject for the EP," He was explaining, "'Blue Moon'. It's kind of.. eh."
"Hmph," I replied, leaning on Phil, whose shoulders were moving because of how intensely Mario Kart was being played.
Troye paused. "Are you okay?" He asked me quietly, and I shrugged. I knew that he knew about the whole art project, but I don't think anyone but Phil understood how deep within the crevice of stress I was.
The only good thing about this was that I wasn't sad. There was nothing to be sad about, for once; only things to be stressed about. But I was happy because Phil and I were working again, although nothing had stopped working, really. We'd thought it had, but love hadn't been lost and trust was rebuilding and it seemed the only thing in our future was a clear horizon, if not filled with bumps of life difficulty. Daisy had always said to me that riches or success didn't matter if you had love and happiness. Considering the way I was expecting things to go, I hoped she was right.
I didn't notice that Phil had paused he and Louise's game. "He's in a rut," My boyfriend told our friend. "With the art scholarship and everything."
"Oh," Troye pouted, scooting over to wrap his skinny arms around me. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No," I replied, my voice muffled. "I don't know what to do or how to get inspiration."
There was silence for a short moment before Phil spoke up with hope in his voice. "Babe," He started, "How about this weekend we go for a walk? Just a real long one, and maybe you'll see something to help start a spark."
I nodded against Troye's arm. "Okay, maybe. I doubt it will help."
"Don't be a Danny Downer," He scolded, making me smile. "You'll get it. Even if not until the night before. Once I watched a show where a guy wrote an entire album in eleven hours."
Troye let out a loud breath. "I'm glad I'm not that poor sucker." I laughed, which seemed to make the boys feel better about my current mental stance. I was so glad I had my friends to rely on when I felt like I was snapping at the edges. If I had to deal with this while faced with the crippling loneliness and young hopelessness I'd felt only back in September; I had no idea whether or not I would have been able to handle it. Would I have even had the courage to try?
***
That weekend, Phil followed through with his plan to find me some inspiration.
Saturday morning, he woke me up early, and we prepared a five star breakfast of two bowls of Shreddies and two Star Wars mugs of coffee. I didn't love coffee as much as my boyfriend did, but he always accidentally made more than he could fit in a mug. Plus, I'd stayed up quite late the night before, wrapped in Phil's arms and yet not being able to find sleep within the comfort, so I hoped the caffeine filled drink would give enough energy for me to actually focus on possible artistry within our everyday world.
"Where are we going?" I asked him after I'd successfully thrown on a black sweater and black jeans, watching as he shimmied into his jeans similar to mine.
"Who knows?" Phil replied, smiling at me with a glint in his eye. "We'll just walk until you get inspired."
I heavily resisted the urge to roll my eyes. This wasn't going to help. How was I supposed to find incentive on the streets I walked on every day? I knew Phil had more hope than I, but it seemed a bit ridiculous by now.
He walked into the bathroom, and I sat down on the bed, flinching when something dug into my thigh. I lifted up and saw that it was Phil's sketchbook.
Immediately, my thoughts returned to when we had first began talking. I remembered short glances at the charcoal smudged paper beneath his gaze and even written words beside those drawings, small and messy, but less messy than my own writing. I remembered similar dimensions of a person throughout each page, noticed by me even if I wasn't attempting to notice it in the first place.
I ran my fingers along the spine of the nearly destroyed book, smiling to myself as I thought about art class with him, the true root of us talking in the first place, to be honest.
I hesitated when I began to lift the cover, wondering if it was an invasion of privacy. I mean, Phil had seen all of my paintings, why couldn't I see a few of his drawings?
Shrugging slightly, I pushed up the cover of the sketchbook, finding a page full of words rather than a drawing. I furrowed my eyebrows; I didn't know Phil wrote.
You can find dark within the dark but never light within light, I read, because brightness is blinding and only a solid, while darkness is infinite and full of more and more, a tunnel you can walk through and never find the end. You can reach your arms out and you won't find a wall; there is nothing to hang onto but more black emptiness and I have been in it for years and I have not found my light.
I frowned, skipping a few pages that had words similar to those. There was a drawing I found around six pages in, a shadowed jawline with prominent collarbones beneath it. Have you ever found a flashlight and seconds later you drop it and the light is gone? This happens to me every day.
The next page was a drawing of lips. If I am so sad and he is so sad then how can the both of us make each other so happy?
I heard the bathroom door opened and slammed the book shut, quickly shoving it under the mattress in hopes Phil wouldn't search for it. I wanted to read more when he fell asleep. It almost felt wrong, as if I was reading through a journal with a lock I had no key to. I stood up as my boyfriend walked into the room.
"You ready?" He questioned, and I nodded, following him down the stairs with a small notebook from my bedside table in my hand. Phil had told me to bring it; he knew it was where I wrote down my ideas and we weren't going to get anywhere if I actually did have one and then couldn't remember it later on.
I shook away any thoughts of the sketchbook as I instead took the boy beside me's hand, relishing in the warmth immediately shooting through my arm. Every time. I would never grow to be tired of it.
We walked all the way into town without a word being spoken. It wasn't that there was nothing to say, or even that we were just enjoying a comfortable silence; it was just Phil attempting to give my mind the opportunity to find something within the warm air or the empty streets that maybe, just maybe would give me an idea. I didn't know if I exactly appreciated this at the moment, considering the fact I was being pessimistic and had no hope that we would accomplish anything today, and I wasn't actually attempting to do what he expected of me.
"Anything yet?" Phil questioned excitedly when I wrote down the word 'people' in my notebook.
I looked at him, annoyed, but smiled at him anyway. "No, it doesn't work like that," I explained, but didn't exactly delve into the details of how it did work.
"I know, babe," He answered.
We made our way into a small cafe three blocks down from the bookstore. If we stayed long enough, it wouldn't take long to walk from here to our job of which the shift started at three. I didn't come in here often, but it was a cute and cheap enough place to stop at whenever there was a felt need to stop somewhere. Phil ordered a caramel latte while I got hot chocolate, and we sat down at a table in the far back corner, silent as I stared at my nearly empty sheet of paper.
"Why is something I normally have no trouble with causing me trouble now, of all times?" I asked, although I didn't expect an answer. It was just life playing a cruel joke on me. Now I had about less than two weeks to prepare seven paintings, and I was nearly sure I was the only one out of the fifteen to be having this issue.
"I wish I could help," Phil told me, sipping his drink and frowning.
"You are," I assured him, "it's just my brain being stupid. You're helping a lot."
My boyfriend nodded and sat in silence as I was sure he could tell I was attempting to fish anything from the crevices of my mind. This, however, was interrupted when a large group of people walked into the cafe.
Phil and I shared a look; it was not usual for groups of people to walk around in this place, and especially not people we'd never seen before. I shifted my eyes towards them but not my demeanor, not allowing for them to notice they'd caught my attention. Although, it all calmed when I heard one of the tall girls inform the barista that they were a college band group just passing through. They looked like nice people, all generally attractive and dressed nice, none of them being rude to the barista or each other.
I moved my attention from them and instead looked up at my boyfriend who had stopped paying attention to both me and the other people there, instead focusing his blue eyes on the straw he had to stir his drink, whipped cream swirling into the tan colored liquid and causing steam to rise up, enough to fog up his glasses if he had been wearing them at that moment. I thought about the stuff he had written in his sketchbook and I wondered if I later read more of it, would his words differ? An inch of me was concerned they wouldn't and that his self diminishing melancholy thoughts from the beginning still haunted him now.
The thought didn't really have too much evidence to be deemed truthful, however. I noticed how the smile I had decided could never get any brighter had done just that within the last few months, and the smooth skin around his eyes were forming smile lines that weren't there at the beginning of the school year. He looked healthier, and more awake in the mornings and the laughs that I'd admired for a long while weren't even his real laughs; his real laughter sounded hesitant even if it wasn't, and his tongue poked out from between his teeth and the sound was better than any of the music I'd spent swaying to in the early mornings of darkness while I should have been sleeping and was instead attempting to paint my feelings.
His happiness was contagious to mine, laughs and smiles doubled when we were together: tripled, quadrupled and I knew that the both of us were as happy as we'd always wanted to be. I recalled the night of New Years when we'd kissed for the first time and I remembered the joy radiating between us both. Every day felt like that now.
And we weren't happy because of each other, no; we were simply aiding each other in finding that merriness separately, and having a healthy relationship added to it a lot. Of course Phil made me happy, but there was a fine difference between me being able to heal on my own versus only smiling about anything when he was around. That was why I hated most angsty teenage relationships. We were becoming happy with each other there to witness it.
I thought about the beauty he had when he was happy, and even when he was feeling sad or tired or, although rare, angry. There was something mesmerizing about the emotions and reactions and attractions of humans.
I looked down at my paper. People.
"Phil," I stated quietly, an idea sinking into my mind as I looked up at the boy across from me, smiling just slightly. "I think I've got it."
-
YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT I FUCKFISNB WANT TO DO? i want to write a violinist!dan au so bad and THE REASONS ARE: 1.) i choose dan bc im better at writing him and 2.) im a violinist and i would love to incorporate that part of my personality into one of my characters
what do u guys think *wiggles eyebrows* it wouldnt be for a while bc i have Opposites (pastel/punk) and Entanglement (demon/angel) to write FIRST but i could do this after. so many ideas in my head it hurts lmao
is anyone here a fan of undertale? i love love love it
anyway 64 days until i meet dan and phil and 104 until i meet my best friend! also sorry about slower updates, im having writers block for how i want to finish the book and i dont have many finished chapters in my drafts. im trying to stretch it out.
love u guys and hope ur doing well!