Elizabeth Rossi (11) | STAFF REPORTER
I don’t know my name or face anymore. I can’t remember how or when it happened. I don’t even know if it did. I can’t remember the beginning or the end.
But I know that paper and pencil are my skin and bone; the foaming reek of cigarettes is venom to my head; using colours, pigments, and hues may be the boldest visual manipulation committed by human hands.
I know how routinely each evening, I take a seat on the train home around six with nothing except a sketchbook and pencil in hand. Observing my surroundings, I drag the lead and cloak a number of pages in designs of shifting black.
Last week, a girl, almost infantile, fell asleep in the arms of an aged woman who I assumed to be her grandmother. It was a loose drawing with many imperfections, but what I captured was raw. When I gave the elder my sketch, her eyes crinkled, and she grinned at the paper.
At least that’s what I have come to imagine were I able to make more than shapes with my lips and drawings capable of being seen. It’s one of the rather unavoidable downsides of being dead—a passenger in the tides churned full of breathing and very alive people; a passenger on this train, both literal and figurative at this point.
I can’t step off of it, this cyclical unit of traveling to and fro with so many people who seem to know exactly where they’re headed. They’re all so decided, unlike I ever was when I had affairs and matters to decide. Not that I ever had to make choices with pertinence weighted so severely upon them, because I never really had that many choices to make; I had those done for me, not necessarily by others, but by my own needs, not wants.
I know I was supposed to be something great, like an altruistically dedicated doctor or a brilliant and innovative architect. That never happened. And now, as I think back to school, I wonder if anything back then made a difference.
All the times I locked up my love to key a brighter door that seemed twice as dull to my eyes—here I am, well-respected professional or not, still on the same train. Maybe if I had followed that path, I would have saved hundreds of lives. Maybe it’s a good thing that I hadn’t, because someone else with more love for it than me might have saved millions.
I can’t step off of this train. I don’t think I want to because I have no clue where my life ended or even began, considering I seemed to be so passive in it. And now, I’m surrounded by innumerable individuals who make their own choices every day. They choose to step on the train—whether to meet a once-villainized parent from their childhood gaze or find their place in an academic circle, accepted into a prestigious program. They might be on their way to an interview for the job that may perhaps redirect the entire trajectory of their life, or maybe it’ll pivot the future of everyone else’s.
I can’t step off of this train because I chose not to my entire life for the sake of being some jarred shooting star in the prizing eyes of who? I don’t even know anymore, and why should I have cared? Their eyes see me, yes, but so does everyone else. Their disappointment doesn’t stop the sun and dry the sea; it doesn’t tear the roots of every tree from the earth or spill anyone’s blood, so why did it matter so dearly to me? I could not tell you even with all of my time just thinking alone on this train, sketchbook in hand with faces I’ll forget as others have mine, wondering if the sacrifice was worth the price of only being able to breathe my love for art, not medicine, not anything else.
But the train keeps moving, and I, a ghost of missed choices, am bound to ride it endlessly, searching for what little meaning I can still find and give to know my home.
