I Draw.

I don’t remember when I started to draw. I was told I quickly took on to drawing at the very early age I was introduced to it. One of my earlier great works is a tiger. Scribbles going up and down all ways like this; and they were a tiger. A tiger. Brilliant. Amazing if I think about it now. I didn’t know how to draw a tiger, but I wanted one recreated on paper and so I did whatever I could. And I’m positive I thought it was the ultimate epitome of the panthera tigris species at the time. I wanted to draw, and so I did. 

What have I become.

I grew up drawing. There probably wasn’t a day I went in elementary school without drawing something, may it be the slightest doodle in the margin of history textbook. I remember in third grade I would hurl my school bag in the corner of the sofa as soon I got home and grab a piece of A4 sized paper from the printer, sit down at the table, pull out my multicolor and all terrain pen from my pocket, and get started on business because I had a new style of drawing an eye that I had been storing up all day so I could get to my multicolor pen and pour all that eye out. The eye had the gleam shining in my eyes at that moment. I grew up drawing.

But by the time I learned there existed a certain thing called ranking of scores, something had changed. I had no longing anymore. Drawing was never first priority. I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t really have something I wanted to depict either. Instead it stuck to my hand and became a habit I’d never quite asked for. Lemony Snicket said in The Slippery Slope that fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like. Now my life is like that. And an awful lot of waiters comprise half empty bones of shaky pen strokes, muscles filled with the most delicate of curves that turn out to be nothing, and skin emitting an iridescent hue simply came into existence out of sheer sake of creating the concoction of color itself. 

I’m addicted. I can’t let my hands be when I’m listening to something or watching TV. So I move them and something is recreated on paper. But this time I didn’t want to draw a tiger. I didn’t want to draw anything. I don’t want to draw anything anymore. But the problem is that I don’t have anything else I like even remotely as much as how I liked drawing. And so I hold on to that stark memory I have of the joy I felt in art a few years earlier. It’s going nowhere.

Then I realized with some advice from a particular teacher that I needed time to experiment. I’m doing that now. I was assigned to fill a small sketchbook up with this subject I had never actually much tried drawing before: myself. I don’t know where this will lead, but what else do I have to do? I’ll grow up drawing.