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yusselah · 4 years ago

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Draw Well, Be Well

My Daughter’s Reminders

My daughter Jenny grew up falling down, with a fractured tibia here and a black eye there. Injuries stemming from a central nervous system disorder with a hard to pronounce name: Incontinentia Pigmenti. After 32 years, the words still freeze on my tongue.

I.P. is not a one-size-fits-all genetic disorder in the ways it affects the lives of the baby girls who are born with it. For Jenny, a woman with a girlish face and a small body, this rare neurocutaneous condition deprives her of many things: the balance to stand, walk, or enjoy the kind of grapho-motor control that enables her mother and brother, both formally trained artists, to draw with precision.

Precision can be very appealing in the right hands. But my daughter doesn’t draw for appeal, or approval. She draws to be well; to feel well; and for her, thank goodness, the very act of picture-making has for decades now afforded her a pleasurable way of breaking past the gravity of her immense motor and cognitive challenges. The story of Jenny’s love of picture-making and the goodness she’s drawn from pictures are perhaps best illustrated in the images she paraded through my old appointment book in a furious sprint over a cold winter’s night when she was 16. As they remind me, indeed I cannot forget them, she was quite ill in body and mind following a mind-shattering fall after becoming severely sleep deprived at a special summer camp. Had the staff been trained to detect and act on the signs of her obvious sleep deprivation, she might have been spared the half year she lost while living in the painful limbo in her shattered consciousness, where unrecoverable sleep falls. She might have avoided her hallucinations, and the dreadful fear of being swallowed back into the jaws of the seizure monsters that ripped entire pages from her school calendar while she was a little girl.

I refer to these images as my daughter’s reminders, in part because she made them in an old datebook of mine, drawing freely over pages containing handwritten reminders of my appointments and tasks to be completed. But even more so because her images like the fast-falling peanut shell and winged red horse she drew there remind me of the importance picture-making has played in our lives. They remind me how reliably Jenny Lily Gordon, now 32, has piloted herself through dark times on the tip of a pen. How she’s drawn genies back into fallen bottles. And created a hearth of warm friction when her off-kilter body ran a little too cold - as it often does when her neurological temperatures flowed in different directions. Warm on her left, frosty along her right. But “just right” — like a fairy tale porridge — when her busy left hand is working with her eyes to make a new picture.

From the moment she was able to pick up and hold onto a crayon at the age of three, which was not easy for her, drawing has given my daughter a trustworthy way to communicate when words failed her. You see, Jenny’s thoughts get stuck in the upper shelves of her fragile brain’s speech and language freezer. She finds it easier to produce certain kinds of ideas using ink and lead pigments which fly effortlessly from her drawing instruments without a lot of words weighing them down.

Making pictures offers her a profound well-spring of wellness because the activity also provides a fount of liberating physical release. For although she can’t ice-skate or play soccer, she can take great speed on the point of a No. 2 pencil. And the rhythmic sound the lead tip makes against a sheet of paper is music to her ears. “The paper is a mountain I can climb, where you and me can go up to anywhere, we can fly away,” she once told me as we drew beneath a star-studded August sky . To Jenny, the earth’s gravity can be supremely limiting while her paper universe is boundless.

Since her earliest years, our curly-headed, cognitively- and visually-impaired daughter, has been drawn to our home’s bright, white shelves. They’re packed with paper, old calendars, new and used sketchbooks, fat patches of fabric and pens and inkwells of tangy colors: raspberry, lemon, blueberry, carrot, eggplant and chocolate. She continues to reach for these colorful supplies to flavor her way over the bitter aftertaste of some pretty potent medicines.

These particular reminders of Jenny’s scratch deeply into my memories --and my wife’s -- of many of her hardest times. Times when she lost her appetite completely. Times when she couldn’t grip a spoon or hold a cup of milk; night times when repeated falls from her consciousness — sparked by uncontrollable seizures — ripped entire pages out of her school calendar. These are the kinds of drawn reminders I kept hidden in a desk drawer for years even though I cherished them as visual celebrations of Jenny’s remarkable tenacity and strong desire not to be counted out.

When the tornado side effects of her powerful anti-convulsants began to lighten, she immediately reached for her friction sticks to draw her way back to a steadier state of mind. Her pens and pencils were like a conductors’ baton with which to find the music to lift up and re-organize her disordered mind. The pictures were dance partners to her songs. Pictures went hand and hand with singing. They were dance partners that came together over many hours, across many days, until a new destination appeared. These pictures trigger my gratitude for the ancient red line of drawing - the pulsating, sanguine line which runs like the Hudson River through all of human time. Drawing has also given me a way to express gratitude everyday for a piece of chalk, for a circle, or those beautiful, swift lines that drive comic books.

But I have a special gratitude for these images she paraded across the grey pinstriped pages of my old 2007 appointment calendar. They remind me how drawing alongside her for over three decades has again and again restored our hope of finding some joy in the next five, ten or fifteen minutes. The hope that drawing provides is coming in very handy right now as we live through this vaccine-less pandemic.

It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but to me these pictures are worth a thousand pictures each. An entire year can be glanced in a solitary image: like that long stretch of time when Jenny’s leg was broken in a completely preventable fall. Thank goodness her hands weren’t hurt. She could still wield magic markers, whose bright, magical colors and pungent scents helped lessen her pain.

“My leg hurts, but the itching is worse,” she told me as we drew cats’ faces over the dense, white cast that stretched from her foot all the way up her thigh. She had injured her right leg during a fall from a rowing machine in a health club. The “trainer” had not remembered to fasten the seat belt, but left Jenny’s right foot tightly fastened to the binding in machine’s pedal; when she slid unattended from the seat and struck the floor, her bound leg twisted radically, resulting in what her orthopedist reassured us was “just a skier’s fracture.” But “just” to Jenny is not really any old just. The fracture healed fine, but the surrounding anatomy never quite restored.

I’m reminded how at night her swollen limb throbbed with blue pain - and that the little balance she had before, enabling her to stand up and pivot with our support, was gone. So we carried her.

One night as we drew more icons over the rock-hard plaster, she paused to say, “Joseph, did you know I am drawing-able? I am very, very able to draw. I can draw all day. I’m never afraid. I have zero paper fright.”

“So you have no ‘stage fright’ when you draw?,” I clarified.

“Zero!” she shot back. “It never hurts to draw, it’s never scary so don’t be scared, dad, ok?”

Ever since, I have tried to take her word for it. Not fearing how a picture might be seen or judged by others is a freedom few of us carry over from childhood.

“Jenny doesn’t draw for anyone’s sake but her own, does she?” an artist friend John asked me as they sat together at a tall window overlooking a row of massive trees outside our Bronx apartment.

She had been drawing at that sill for several hours, filling the pages of an old composition book that once belonged to her brother. Old sketchbooks, spiral notebooks or other semi-used booklets of paper held a special allure because they contained the appealing marks of people whose drawings she loved.

“What are you drawing?” John asked. “The birds, the squirrels?”

The animals were busy that afternoon, flying between branches which dropped red and yellow leafs

“I’m just drawing a picture, John,” she replied. “You want to make one?”

“I once just drew lots of pictures, too, Jenny. On the farm where we all grew up. I drew between my chores and homework.”

“You weren’t scared right?”

“Not a bit,” he replied, as he grabbed a pencil.

Picture-making’s reliability in shifting one’s vantage point is helpful when you’re perpetually sitting on the edge of your next fall. For eleven years she was besieged by seizures while transitioning into and out of sleep. I am reminded of those nights by her image of the hovering “seizure monster” who, she said, was like “crocodiles biting through her pillows.” They flew off with her voice. “I couldn’t speak when they came.” Examining her picture several years later, she told me “I’m glad that bitch is gone.”

Many of our hardest falls are lurking just around the corner, yet we don’t see them even as we’re heading towards them. Like that tree branch snaking beneath the cement sidewalk, opening up a crack that swallows the wheel of your wheelchair, sending you crashing. A collision with asphalt can mark up your porcelain face with alarming exclamation points. These shout out your extreme vulnerability to your neighbors when they see you in the lobby of the 14-story, red-brick high-rise you call home.

“The colors hurt a lot more than my face does” she once confided, referring to the attention that comes with every bloom of these dreaded color palettes. The hues of purple, crimson, curry yellow, and cloudy grey can take weeks to fade. These are times to stay clear of windows and mirrors, because the reflections really do hurt. Whenever she got slammed she reflexively turned to picture-making, selecting and blending soothing colors and picturing a reassuring and perhaps more stable landscape.

All of this is to remind me how I am deeply grateful for these particular pictures made in her fierce sprint to recover herself from the calamitous fall she took when she was 16. These are the book of pictures I hid away for years. I just couldn’t bare to look at them. They were too potent, too illustrative of that most shattering fall that I should have seen coming. I felt guilty for having placed my paternal trust in that Godforsaken sleep away camp; a sailing camp stationed in a former nunnery in picturesque Newport, Rhode Island. It was there that she fell unnoticed through her REM cycle into the depths of the most severe sleep deprivation. A clueless trio of camp nurses were simply too untrained to see what had happened to her, even though she was unable to speak, sit, eat or recognize her own parents. “Oh, she’ll be just fine,” the smiling nurse told us, having no idea that Jenny’s severe sleep loss had disorganized her brain so profoundly that she took a year to fully recover. She lingered in that place where unrecoverable sleep falls, alone and lonely, a lost soul in a song-less, picture-less limbo. She dwelled in that nowhere space from late August through late December.

It was a hellish period during which time I soon came tumbling down my own mental hill, like Jack following Jill. Which is why these images remain such vivid reminders of that night in late December as Jenny’s recovery began to take shape in this remarkable parade of pictures, which sprouted fruits, and birds, and rivers, and strange bits of self-portraiture, like that disembodied head rolling down August.

They are still dancing in my old datebook with the red ribbon place mark. Her quickly drawn bright plumes of birds feathers and her fast-falling orange peanut shell all poured forth one winter’s night and morning four months after her August fall. They flowed swiftly when just a few hours before she could barely lift a pencil. After so many painful days of passivity, depression, and sleep disturbed nights, they took form through her tired fingers onto the grey pinstriped pages of my old Lettes of London appointment book. And as she drew I knew as only a parent can know that our daughter was surely on her way back to her steadier self again.

I saw the sparkle return to her wan, brown eyes; and the red rouge come back to her pale cheeks. Should I ever forget what drawing can do for a human being I will look at these pictures once again.

When she first reached for the place-mark of that old appointment book, I was annoyed with her lingering illness and with myself for having held onto all these dozens of outdated appointment books - paper objects that had left me bound to the past, and clinging hopelessly to the idea that if I could just plan my days carefully enough that I might not be so fearful of the future. I had gritted my teeth as I began tossing the red- and black-covered journals into the trash. But when the red ribbon danced from the Lettes’ binding it lit Jenny up like a fuse. “Please give it to me, I want to draw in it,” she said as I handed the book over and helped her gather up her markers.

She quickly began charting her way across the meridian of reminders cluttered with notes of my old appointments. Several hours later, she was still going strong, but I insisted that she stop and try to get some sleep. As sound sleep cycle was still eluding us. She nonetheless awoke early the next morning to continue drawing.

“Look at all of these wonderful pictures you made. You draw so well,” I said as she moved her friction sticks swiftly over the pin-striped pages like a wind-filled sailboat cutting across Naragansett Bay.

“Well, dad, you know,” she replied, “Draw well, be well.” She lifted her head to survey the colors of her many pens that lay before her, picked out several reds and oranges, and drew on fearlessly for hours.

- Joe Gordon

#reminders #imagery

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jiminsbyuns-blog · 8 years ago

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Day 74

Featuring: Yoongi, You

Warnings: slight language

Written by: Admin V

Those eyes. Those legs. Those lips. Those hands. Only you would fall in love with a boy just by drawing him over and over again. But you really can’t help it--Min Yoongi is just too, too beautiful.

This isn’t creepy at all.

You sit at the back of the classroom, sketchbook out in front of you. The teacher and the other students are droning on and on, something that is just a faint buzz to you in the back of your mind.

But there was, in particular, one student that you paid attention to.

You bite your bottom lip as your pen scratches across the paper. For some reason, you just can’t capture his beauty the way that you wanted to. You don’t do him justice.

None of your sketches do.

Guilt burns in your chest as you trace out the faint strands of his hair, flawlessly styled naturally without a single thing done to it all.

Everyday, you force yourself to have some common sense.

It’s just an art exercise.

This means nothing.

Don’t you think you’re being more than a little creepy right now?

You gulp, scanning your paper. Check the number at the top of the page.

74/100.

For the millionth time, you curse yourself. Anybody. You could have picked anybody except for him.

But you just love to dig your own grave, don’t you?

Day 1

“Pick a figure to sketch daily throughout the rest of the semester. It can be anything—a person, place, or thing. At the end of the semester, we will review all of the sketches to track your progress throughout the school year. The point of the project is to capture candid moments in everyday life, not staged ones. Remember: if you are a picking a person to sketch, it is imperative that you do so without being found out.”

You let the assignment sheet flutter out of your hands and banged your head on the desk.

It wasn’t that you hated your Drawing III class. In fact, it was great.

The problem was that you had no idea what to choose.

An object seemed boring and it would get repetitive in only a few days. A place wasn’t too bad, but you would have to travel, and you couldn’t guarantee being able to get there every single day without fail.

That left… a person.

But who?

You looked around at your English class. There wasn’t anybody in particular that struck you as interesting, but…

No, you chided yourself.

There was one boy.

Whereas you sat at the back of class on one side, on the other side opposite you was another student. Black sideswept hair. Grey Twenty-One Pilots hoodie. Purple beanie, topped upon his head.

Yoongi.

You didn’t know his last name, but what you did know was that the guy, for some reason, hated you. Every time the two of you so much as made eye contact, he glared at you. And if you so much as entered a conversation that he also happened to be in, he immediately picked himself up and left. Apparently he wanted nothing to do with you.

Why, you had zero idea.

You were just about to cross him off your list when your eyes glanced down at the paper again.

Remember: if you are a picking a person to sketch, it is imperative that you do so without being found out.

Well, if he hated you, he would never find out, would he? He would never come over here, would never so much as glance at you. Then technically, wasn’t he the perfect person for you to draw? You could sketch him to your heart’s content and he wouldn’t even bat a lash.

A slight smirk tugging at the corner of your lips, you flipped open your sketchbook and uncapped your pen.

Yoongi, it was.

Day 20

It was around here that you started to notice something… different.

It was just like any other day, you swore to God it was. You got up, did whatever you had to get ready, and then headed out the door to class. Spring was on it’s way, which made for splendid weather in the mornings when you went on your walks. Sketchbook tucked underneath your arm securely, you hummed a little tune as you made your way to English.

You had spent the past two weeks drawing Yoongi, and it was when you were in the middle of your sketch that you suddenly jolted.

You weren’t even drawing anymore.

You were just staring at him.

He had a slight slouch to his stance, head rested on his hand. His eyes followed whatever the teacher was saying on the screen, not bothering to take notes despite the Macbook propped open in front of him. His legs were crossed, his left foot slightly pointed inwards. Pigeon-toed.

You cleared your throat and sat up straighter. Shook your head. What were you doing? You were supposed to be drawing him, not gawking at him like some sort of weirdo.

You picked your pen up, sketched quickly for the next five minutes, until you decided to call it quits. You could finish another day. Something was feeling off, and you couldn’t for the love of God figure out what.

You shut your sketchbook and forced yourself to stare at the teacher’s Powerpoint instead.

Not Yoongi.

Day 36

By the beginning of the second month, you could feel yourself pivoting.

The more you sketched Yoongi, the more you found yourself thinking about him. English class suddenly became your favorite class of the day. You loved coming into the quiet, empty room—the first person in the morning—and watching him settle into his workspace from the comfort of your desk.

He would take his bag off his shoulder, sling it neatly onto the ground. Pull out his laptop, always open it and turn it on, even when he didn’t take notes. He would seat himself neatly, a tinge of sleep still evident in his slightly swollen eyes, his lips pursed as he gently peeled open the top of his coffee cup, blew on it for a few seconds, and then took a deep sip.

Your sketchbook was full of Yoongis.

Yoongi slouched over.

Yoongi sleeping.

Yoongi typing.

Yoongi reading.

Yoongi daydreaming.

There were Yoongis with his head on his hand, his cheek squished up oh-so slightly. Then there were Yoongis with his lips pursed and pouted, as he was deep in thought.

You were beginning to pinpoint his good days, his bad days.

Bad days consisted of him coming into class with a stare that dripped murder. Bad days had Yoongi not saying a single word the whole one and half hours. Bad days had Yoongi ignoring everybody else around him, wrapped up in his own world of whatever horrid thing had gotten ahold of him that morning.

Good days were your favorite. Though bad days were Yoongi’s good modeling days, there was something so completely different about him if he was in a more pleasant mood.

Because on a good day, you got to see Yoongi smile.

Good days had Yoongi getting up, moving around the classroom. If you were lucky, good days had Yoongi even laughing—a rare occasion, and something to be treasured. Good days had Yoongi jabbering in non-stop conversations and good days had Yoongi seeming positively radiant.

You loved good days. Good days were harder for you to sketch, but good days were easy for you on the heart.

What that meant, you had absolutely no idea.

Day 47

It was around your forty seventh sketch when you started to realize just how truly beautiful Yoongi was.

His slight gestures and his slight lisp made him most endearing, but a pleasant feeling filled your chest when you were sketching his eyes, drawing the point of his nose, detailing around the cupid’s bow of his mouth.

Because Yoongi’s got the most perfect eyes, slightly slanted, but still full and round and absolutely doe-like. And if he turned at the slightest angle, you could see how smooth and fine the bridge of his nose was. His lips have the most unique, the most peculiar shape to them, and something you particularly loved was the slight chub he still had around his mouth, just a little puff puff.

And it wasn’t even just his face.

You smiled to yourself as you sketched lower, focusing on the positioning of his hands. You loved his hands, too—almost like a pale gold, with every knuckle of every finger detailed and defined.

He stood up to speak to the teacher, and you can feel your heart flutter like some sort of idiot. Because Yoongi’s legs. His calves were something to marvel at, you swear. If his hands and face were a pale gold, his legs were definitely something of a cartier white-gold.

Sitting at your desk, you thought all of these things to yourself and you had never wanted to slap yourself in the face any more than you did now.

Because you know you’re being irrational, and you’re being dumb, and you’re almost completely one hundred and twenty percent sure that you’re overreacting to everything.

But it’s not like you can just stop sketching in the middle of your assignment, right?

Day 51

“Look at him, isn’t he just so beautiful?”

“You mean handsome?”

“No, I mean beautiful.”

You didn’t particularly like to share your sketches with other people, but you always did with your best friend. And though you knew that you were low-key being a total creeper as you explained in high definition detail the knicks and knacks of Yoongi’s artistically beautiful body, you just couldn’t stop yourself. It was as if it all of sudden just poured out of you, like you had this need to constantly talk about him, almost like if you stopped keeping his name upon the tip of your tongue he would simply cease to exist.

Your friend raised an eyebrow at you.

“Are you sure this kind of attraction is normal?”

“Oh, come on! It’s not like I want to date him or anything. I’m just saying—”

“Or do you?”

“Excuse me?”

Your friend smirked as she fingered through the various pages in your sketchbook. Yoongis decorated the whole entire book so far, so many pen sketches. Over and over again, almost somewhat obsessively.

“I’m just saying, it sounds like you’re totally whipped for this Yoongi guy.”

“I-I’m not!” you sputtered, slamming the sketchbook shut. “I just wanted to show his beauty with you, is all.”

“Right.”

“I’m sure he already has a girlfriend or boyfriend anyways,” you quickly said, ignoring the way your stomach did a flip-flop. You grabbed the sketchbook and carefully stored it back into your backpack. “I think you’re hallucinating.”

“Me?” Your best friend cackled. “Says the person that’s going, ‘Oh Yoongi, his nose bridge is just so perfect! You should see his legs, they’ve got the most spectacular definition!’ Next thing you know you’re gonna wanna see his dick—”

“Oh my god, do you ever shut up?!”

You swatted her with your bag as you stood up and got ready to leave room.

“Be careful, you don’t want to ruin your beautiful sketches of your beautiful Yoongi—”

You slammed the door shut behind you and sigh exasperatedly.

But you gulped nervously afterwards.

Looks like she’s on to you, after all.

Day 52

It’s by complete coincidence that you saw Yoongi walking into the cafeteria.

You were paying for your lunch, getting ready to head back to the studio to finish up another project in Ceramics. It was just like any other Saturday for you: get up at four, get to the studio at five. Work until lunchtime, grab your lunch at the cafeteria and then head back to the studio and work until you couldn’t work anymore. The like.

You were slipping your sandwich into your backpack when you saw him.

Yoongi, pulling open the door to the lunchroom and strolling in.

Heart thundering, you willed yourself to look away. Don’t stare, don’t be weird. But you couldn’t, you just had to keep your eyes glued onto his figure as he searched around the lunchroom. And finally, he found who he was looking for and you could only watch in complete horror as he approached a girl sitting with a book and a salad, could only hear your heart snap as he leaned down to kiss her with a smile on his lips.

That smile.

Those lips.

You zipped up your backpack and left the cafeteria as fast as you could.

Day 53

When you sat back down in English class the next day, you couldn’t help but feel a wave of guilt sinking over you.

You flipped through your sketches of Yoongi, smiling sadly to yourself. What the hell were you thinking? That just through observation, you knew Yoongi already? That you somehow had some sort of stake to him?

It was all in your head, you knew.

It was all just a manipulation of some stupid science—hormones and some shit.

Yeah, you comforted yourself. It was just biology doing it’s thing.

Your heart soured.

What were you going to do now? You couldn’t still sketch him, could you? Not when you were…

You wrung out your hands, trying to settle your anxious breathing. You couldn’t be like this. You couldn’t have a crush on a taken guy. You couldn’t—You weren’t—

At the end of English, when the bell rang, when all the kids piled out of the classroom—

Your page was still blank.

Day 54

You’ll get rid of your crush.

You’ll just draw him—that’s it.

Nothing more.

It was only an art exercise.

Just an art exercise.

Day 74

Now, you’re stuck in a horrid cycle of torture.

You love drawing Yoongi. Maybe, even on some sort of alternate artistic level—

You even love Yoongi himself.

But you know that you’re ridiculous, so you just force yourself to make bareback sketches. A quick outline here, a squiggle for his eyebrow and another line for his mouth. Whatever, maybe you’ll just say that you were going for that sort of Picasso look—even though it’s more than obvious you’re completely bullshitting your assignment now.

Because it hurts.

It hurts to draw Yoongi every day and it hurts to be able to trace the features of his face in your mind and it hurts knowing that you’ll never be able to get a good look at them up close, ever.

Love from a distance.

Keep your distance.

That’s what you should be doing.

But when the bell startles you out of your depressed reverie, you’re too much of a frenzy to figure yourself out correctly. You stand up too suddenly, you movements are hasty, and then all of sudden your sketchbook is wide open on the floor and shitshitshit, somebody’s picking it up and—

On the ground, you freeze.

You recognize those shoes.

You recognize those legs.

And slowly, almost on the verge of tears, you stand up, shame forcing red onto your face in the most humiliating, mortifying way possible.

“This is yours—”

He must see the sketches, because his voice falters. Halts completely, and you shut your eyes, feel the tears welling up.

You don’t know what to say. You don’t know what to say to make him not hate you for being a total stalker and a creep and you hate this project, you hate it, whoever made it needs to go die—

His voice is quiet.

“...Are these sketches of...me?”

You still haven’t opened your eyes. You just nod your head, biting down on your lower lip, trembling.

The sound of pages turning slaps you in the face.

Seventy four.

There are seventy four sketches in that book and now the cat’s out of the bag.

You wonder if you’ll just fail this project, after all.

“Hey, look at me.”

I can’t.

But you do.

His voice is slightly rough, a raspy undertone to it. You love hearing his voice. It’s the first time he’s ever talked to you. It’s the first time you’ve ever been so close to him, in the perfect vicinity to ogle at those features that you love so, so much.

“Can I show you something?”

You can only dumbly nod your head.

Yes.

You shut the door quietly behind you.

Jitters electrify you as they crawl up and down your skin, your heart beating too fast, your temples sweating.

You’re in Yoongi’s apartment.

What he wants to show you, you have no idea. Maybe he brought you here to kill you. Maybe he’s secretly some sort of axe murderer and whoa, you’re breathing way too fast and—

“Follow me.”

Yoongi’s place is pretty neat, pretty tidy. But there are pickpockets of things here and there that trigger your curiosity: different lighting setups, camera lenses on the table. There are some polaroids tacked up on the wall in the kitchen, but from where you stand you can’t quite tell what or who they are of.

He leads you into what you can only assume is your bedroom, and he gestures for you to take a seat at his desk.

Yoongi fumbles around with something in his drawers, until he pulls out a huge envelope. It’s packed with lord knows what, and you’re starting to fidget.

Maybe it’s drugs. Maybe he’s gonna drug you or some shit, goddamnit this was a bad idea.

You gulp nervously, trying to swallow the huge lump in your throat. Your eyes scan the wall above his desk. There are photos, all sorts of different electronic media pieces, but strangely…

None with his girlfriend.

Yoongi is quiet, doesn’t say a single word as he pulls up a chair and sits in front of you. He hands you the envelope with not even a peep from his mouth.

Your hands tremble just the tiniest bit as you open the envelope, reach in and pull out…

You’re in shock.

Photos.

But more specifically—

Photos of you.

You in the cafeteria.

You walking on your way to class.

You yawning.

You running.

You stretching your fingers out.

You taking a walk from the art studio.

And they’re all so beautiful. They’re not creepy snapshots, no. They’ve got such an artistic flair to them, something you would never fathom even ever being able to do.

You laugh out loud in relief.

Tears prickle at your eyes and you swipe them away with ease, laughter bubbling up from your throat and out into the room.

“And here I thought I was the stalker!”

Yoongi snorts.

He smiles.

He even laughs.

And your heart flutters so ridiculously much it feels like monarch butterflies are migrating in your chest.

You made him do that.

You made him laugh.

“Trust me,” he says. There’s a glint in his eye that you’ve never seen before. “I’m probably even worse than you are.”

“So, why the photos?”

Yoongi leans back in his seat, rests his arms behind his head.

“Photography major.”

You nod in appreciation. “Gotcha.”

“This project has been going on for some time now—I probably know you better than you know me.”

“Oh, really?” You cross your arms and scoff. “Like what?”

“Like how you only sketch with pens, never pencil.”

You wave your hand. “Doesn’t count. Everybody knows that.”

“You only cross your right leg over your left. Left over right makes you uncomfortable.”

He’s correct.

“Well,” you shoot, “you only drink coffee that has two packets of sugar. Any more or any less, and you won’t drink it.”

Yoongi smirks. “Fair enough.”

“You have to stop yourself from biting on your nails during tests.”

“And you won’t ever stop bobbing your knee up and down,” he responds easily.

“You hate humans in the morning.”

“So do you.”

“You…” Yoongi falters.

And then the game seems to take a different turn.

“You don’t take care of yourself enough. You skip breakfast every day and on Saturday, sometimes the only thing you eat is that sandwich from the caf.”

Your cheeks prickle with heat. How the hell does he know that?

“You… have a girlfriend you need to take care of,” you say, trying to root the conversation back down before it can go somewhere dangerous.

“Not anymore.”

Your eyes snap up to his.

“No?”

He shakes his head, sighs. “She, uh… She found your photos. Thought I was a creep. A cheater.”

“But you’re not. It’s for artistic purposes.”

He shrugs. “She studies mechanical engineering.”

You frown.

“Is that why you’ve been having more bad days recently?”

He quirks an eyebrow at you. “Sure. Yeah.”

“You should find somebody better. Someone else who actually understands.”

There’s a quiet droop in the conversation. Yoongi sits forwards, and his face looks a bit more pink than it was just a few minutes ago. He falters over his words, stuttering slightly.

You can only watch in disbelief, your heartbeat stumbling over itself, as he slowly laces your fingers together with his. His hand is warm.

“I…”

He smiles—his gummy one, the one you love.

“I think I have.”

if anybody ever found my sketches i think i’d go and set myself on fire lmao

xoxo Admin V

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