Metafiction

     It is raining outside. I squeezed my eyes shut, with a blanket pulled over my head. I gave up counting numbers when I reached three hundred. No use, I realized. The night was exceptionally quiet and dark. But somehow I couldn’t fall asleep. The sound of rain, the ticking of the clock, even the sound of my own breathing… Everything bothered me. I mussed up my hair irritably. I got out of my bed and shuffled across the room to the window. My head lolled on it. I felt the pattering of raindrops on my forehead through the cold window. Looking down the empty, gray street, I felt like being in that rain. I paddled to the veranda with my red slippers on. My thin pajamas let in a lot of cold. I shivered slightly. The early morning street is very still. While I looked at the street for about half an hour, nothing changed. I have a weird feeling that I don’t know how to describe it. A strange, weird feeling…

     I decided to go out. I really wanted to be in that raing. Really. I opened the frontdoor and creeped out. Then I noticed, I didn't bring my umbrella. Oh well, I thought, it doesn't matter. And that was when I found that girl crouching under the streetlght. I decided to approach her. The splashing sound broke the silence of morning street. I stopped. She glanced at me, and looked back down, stirring the puddle. I was surprised that her face was very unfamiliar. If she was my neighbor, she should be familiar, but I've never seen her face before. I thought, maybe she's a homeless. I felt a need to know who she is, so that at least I could seek some ways to help her.

     "What are you doing there?"
     She looked up, and again, looked back down. She didn't answer. I asked again.
     "Hey? What are you doing there? Do you live here?"
     She stared at me. Then she answered.
     "I'm drawing. And yes, I live here, ma'am."
     This peculiar girl stimulated my curiosity. A girl who got rained all on her, who is my neighboer yet I've never seen her before, who goes out to street in the early morning, and who draws on water with finger.
     "Drawing? With your finger?"
     "Yes, ma'am. Since I don't have a pencil right now."
     I wanted to hear more. And she did for me.

     I don’t write when I hold a pencil. But that’s not because I have a terrible penmanship. Well, I DO have bad writings. When I write something, others say it’s hardly readable. But that’s not why I don’t write. I don’t write because I’ve got a better thing to do with my pencil. It is drawing. I love drawing, especially drawing with a pencil. Wherever I go somewhere, I used to bring this tiny little pencil with me. Whenever I see something, or most of the time, see somebody worthy of drawing, I take out my pencil and draw. On any ‘draw-able’ surface, I would draw. Sometimes people looks at me oddly when I take out my pencil in restaurants and draw on napkins. But, it is my way of leaving memory. Just like some musicians who make songs to save their moment emotions, and just like some writers who write literatures to express their sentiments into words, I draw. With my 2B pencil, I draw.

     I especially enjoy drawing people’s face. I enjoy catching very tiny differences between people’s faces. Some have sharper noses. Some have higher cheekbones. Some have curlier hair, and some have exceptionally straight hair. Skin texture differs from people to people. Old people have their wrinkles, no matter how much they try to hide those. Babies have very soft and smooth skin that no other has. Men usually have a stronger feature than women. It’s not about having bigger eyes, higher nose, and thicker eyebrows. There is a slight difference that can’t be expressed into words. I love getting detailed differences and imagificating those on a blank paper.

     It was a life-long dilemma, drawing. My mom hated me drawing. She always expected me to sit down in front of a desk, hold pencil, and study. Ironically, she used to be a photographer. She has six cameras in our house, and there are few pictures in frame that she took in her old days. I don’t know much about her being a photographer, since as far as I remember, she was just a housewife. I don’t understand. Why would a person who used to be a photographer (which can be said to be one kind of artist) disdain her daughter drawing? Though, I agree that I am not academically great. Since the first year in school, my grades were way down on Cs. The only subject I was good in was Mathematics. Without spending much time studying math, I could get As in math. But other than that, my report card was mainly full of Cs. She always tried to make my grades A, but that was simply impossible. So when she first found me drawing, she was furious. She took my drawing, and tore the paper into pieces. “If you have any time to waste drawing such things, memorize one more word”, she said. I didn’t say anything. From then, I started drawing when my mom wasn’t around me. The final products were put on my shelves. When the number of drawings exceeded forty, I bought a binder. Soon within a year, the binder got full, and I had to get another one. When I bought a binder and got home, my mom asked me suspiciously why I needed two binders. I was embarrassed for a second, but I answered with a straight face, “Our homeroom teacher told us to get a binder for each subject.” My mom nodded, still looking me with a suspicious look, but she didn’t do any further. By the year I got eleven, I had four binders.

     It was when I became sixth grade that I met a person who appreciated my drawings for the first time of my life. I was the only one in the class room. I looked at a school yard during recess time, and found a boy throwing a soccer ball. He looked like a first or second grader. As soon as I saw him, I started to draw him. I was having a hard time drawing beads of sweat on a boy’s forehead.

“Is that Bred?”

     Someone asked. I looked back.

     “Ms. Dempsey.”

She was my homeroom teacher. She asked again.

“Is that Bred you’re drawing?”

I stared at her. I didn’t know the name of a boy I was drawing. I finally answered.

“Maybe, though I’m not sure.”

“Why don’t you color him? He looks a bit exhausted in the picture. Guess it will be more vivid when you color this.”

Well, there it goes. I don’t color my drawings. Never. And that’s partly because I’m a color blind. Being a color blind doesn’t mean you can’t see any colors, but it does mean that you can hardly see colors. For me, distinguishing green and grey and red is an overwhelming task. I can distinguish yellow and blue from other colors. In fact, yellow and blue is the only color that I can see. What people call as green, pink, orange, red, it’s just all same as gray to me. After a while, I answered,

“I can’t.”

She looked at me with curiosity. I felt a need to explain more to her.

“I can’t see colors.”

“Ah,” she exclaimed. Then she nodded. She ruffled my hair, and left the room.

Since then Ms. Dempsey paid much attention to me. Whenever she found me drawing, she approached me and asked me few questions. She eventually got to know how my mom detests me drawing. So she promised me not to tell my mom a word about me drawing all day long in school. She also got to know that I draw people’s faces most of the time.

“How about drawing some other things? You could draw our school building. You could draw a baseball glove over there. You could draw that big oak tree in the school yard. Or you could even draw your own hand drawing.”

There was no reason for me to refuse her suggestion. She looked out for a good teacher to teach me drawing for next few weeks, and she finally found one. Every Wednesday, I went over to Ms. Dempsey’s house and learned drawing from a teacher she introduced to me. Drawing objects were much more exacting than drawing people. I needed to be more accurate when drawing straight lines, and I had to know chiaroscuro. But most of it was fun. Wednesday soon became my favorite day. Ms. Dempsey informed my mom that I was having some kind of a special tutoring from her. My mom was pretty glad that I attended that fake tutoring. I was happy learning to draw, my mom was happy expecting my grades going up, and everything was perfect.

Apparently, my grades didn’t get better at all. It couldn’t get any better since I didn’t put any additional effort on it. My mom got angry and called my teacher. She made an appointment with my teacher the next day after school. She had few appointments with my previous teachers in former days, and most of the time appointments ended without any special points. But this time, I had a weird, ominous feeling.

The next day, my teacher called me to her office.

“Excuse me,” I said, and she turned back at me, smiling.

“Oh, dear. Sit.”

I sat down, facing her. She then suggested carefully.

“How about focusing on drawing? I see a great opportunity of you to be an artist. Or if you think just drawing isn’t enough, you can consider photograph. Photograph could really work well on you.”

“That’s not what I can decide,” I said.

“Yes, sure. So I was thinking… How about persuading your parents to consider the course of yours as an artist?”

That’s impossible, I said to myself. But I didn’t say anything. Maybe, I thought, this really could be an opportunity for me. This could be a chance for me to have somebody on my side, persuading my mom, and my mom might be moved. My head was sending a ‘no’ sign, but my heart was already pounding pleasantly.

But it didn’t take so long for me to notice that my head was right. I waited my mom in my room to come back from school. I looked outside. It was raining. I took out my notebook and tore one page. I started to draw raindrops tapping on the ground. I remembered when I didn’t know how to draw water drops. I once struggled drawing a sweat on a boy’s forehead. But not now. The paper was soon filled with clear loops on a dark road.

And that turned out to be the last drawing I drew. When my mom returned home that day, she headed directly to me and smashed my head. I was confused. Or maybe, I was not. I was somehow expecting my mom to do so, to become violent. She screamed, repeating ‘how dare you’. She then searched my desk and found four binders full of drawings. She threw those out the window. I stared at my works getting wet in the rain. I watched the papers losing its straightness. I watched my drawings getting all blurred.

But I couldn’t stare at my works being ruined by rain so long since my mom started throwing things. Whoa, I felt a life-threatening terror. Really, things were shooting over my head, as if they were to pierce my head. Her scream was piercing my ear. She was INSANE. And she made me quit my school. I didn't even get a chance to say bye to my friends-well, classmates to be exact-and my teacher. She got me receive a home schooling, and got a private tutor for me. Well, I like my tutor pretty much, though.

 

     When she finished up to here, a stranger interrupted her story.
     “Planning to escape, Mitchell? Huh?”
     We both looked at the stranger. She was a woman with umbrella. She appeared to be around her forties, yet her face was all wrinkled.

“No, mom. I was about to go in.”

The girl in front of me answered. I then realized two important facts: one, the girl's last name was Mitchell, and second, a wrinkled stranger was her mother. That strange woman then grabbed Mitchell's arm roughly and dragged her across the street. Mitchell looked back at me for a second, and disappeared into the rainy street. I had to be in daze for a second. I felt like I just heard a one-night dream of a girl. A sweetest, happiest dream the girl has ever had.