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She Gave Me Life

My beloved is an artist and I am home to her sweet beginnings

By Eloise Robertson Published 3 years ago 5 min read
2

My life began with a crayon on a page. The glittering thick wax in the hands of a child smeared a mark that did not form a particular word or remain between my well-printed lines. The small, dainty hand gripped that crayon and dragged it across my first page without any particular sense of direction. Most notebooks might think it to be a very ungraceful coming into this world, but for me it will always stand as the greatest experience I will ever have. It was a grand awakening full of passion, brightness and glee!

The colours grew bolder as the child explored her own creativity. Her scribbles began to take a more directed form in her steady hand as her mind’s eye grew. Her happiness, her fears, her hatred, the strongest emotions that can rule a child was clearly printed on my pages. Even overcome by emotion she was very gentle with me; her hatred was expressed but I never felt it harm my delicate paper.

I was her companion. My sturdy yet flexible black cover felt warm in her hot hands as she ran to school. It was dark in her schoolbag but I was always stored carefully in the safest and cleanest area. During lunch the afternoon sunlight beamed across my ivory pages as she wrote with a purple marker in somewhat broken sentences about her day, signing off with love Abi, dotting her ‘i’ with a small crooked heart. Every time she wrote to me Dear Diary she would never fail to remind me of her love and it warmed me to my very spine.

My sense of time was so limited in our youth; only when she remembered to write the date in the top corner of the page did I know how many days or months had passed. Though our bond was strong, I was left lonely, my pages untouched and cold for seven long years. It was a solemn experience for me. I couldn’t be sure if months, years or decades were passing while I waited in the shadows at the back of her drawer. I wondered if she was safe, if I would ever feel her friendly script on my paper again.

Finally, I sensed a date written in neat handwriting at the top of a fresh page. At first the sharp, pointed writing implement was a shock. I had never felt something so strong yet smooth and accurate. The words fit neatly between my lines and the curves and swings in the lettering were so graceful and confident that I could only exist in the moment and appreciate them. This person wrote a neat to-do list. I did not judge its mundane nature; instead I cherished it for the care given to each stroke of the pen, each letter linking to the next in a dexterous and fluid movement. This experience was in direct contrast to my dearly beloved youth who had decorated my pages previously.

While this person was clearly not a youth, I quickly found out that she was still my beloved, just as I was still hers. With complete disregard for my lined paper a soft pencil skimmed across the face of my page with repetitive and gentle strokes. The second day after I was reclaimed by my beloved she blessed my pages with a beautiful, delicate sketch of an eye with long lashes curling out, soft brow relaxed, and pupil dilated. She dated the drawing and signed her name at the base: Abi Reynolds. New life was breathed into me as I was given the gift of sight. Through this eye I could see the soft rounded face framed by thin brunette hair gazing down at me as she doodled a border around my page, lost in her deep perplexing thoughts. These thoughts she shared with me over the year in weekly diary entries between her rough sketches. When her fingers flicked through my pages I would catch a glimpse of her as the page with the eye was briefly opened. She developed a new habit which I quite enjoyed. Her soft fingers would twirl around my ribbon bookmark, folding it into shapes or smoothing it between her thumb and forefinger like a massage just for me.

Experiencing this beautiful life of hers alongside her, being her trusted confidant, her creative platform, and her emergency resource always close by. . . I could not have asked for a more fulfilling existence. It was toward the end of my journey with her that she bestowed upon me the most awesome, passionate and inspiring gift of all our years together. My beloved had begun drafting a short story. I sensed her frustration as she wrote a sentence only to hastily put a sharp cross through it. She wrote and rewrote. She drew so many arrows switching sentence order that I almost lost track. There was a pause halfway through while she mapped out her characters and their traits. Finally, toward my final pages, she completed her story. It was a work of art that I was delighted to hold safe for her.

Although still young she was a very talented writer. I could not have been more proud of her and how she had grown into a young adult with her own voice, a voice I was very familiar with now. On my last page, she wrote a letter beginning with the warm words Dear Diary. Her writing was full of excitement like I had never felt, not even matching the diary entry she wrote after her first date! I waited tensely, gripped still by her frantic fingers while she printed words at amazing speed. She had rewritten her story for a writing competition, submitting two weeks ago and had received the fantastic news that she had won first place with the best entry. Her grand prize was $20,000. A sticker that used to be on the back of my black cover said $7.48. It was hard for me to judge monetary value but I knew that this could be life-changing for her as she detailed her wondrous plans with the money. She had grand designs which she tried to show me through her sketches. She drew her room I had twice glimpsed with my eye, only with a large solid bookshelf by her bed. On that shelf was a treasury of novels, diaries, figurines, bookends, and perfume bottles, an array of sketchbooks, pastels, and paints. She was an artist and I was home to the years when her talent was first discovered. On this bookshelf I would forever stand spending an eternity visiting my full pages, never to continue my journey with her but always able to appreciate the past. Our bond gave her the opportunity to write and to win her first prize that would begin a fantastic career, of that I was sure.

literature
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About the Creator

Eloise Robertson

I pull my ideas randomly out of thin air and they materialise on a page. Some may call me a magician.

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