Point of View: Nick
I sat at the desk and stared at the tray.
I felt like I was thinking in shapes and patterns more than in words these days. Words were obtuse and too big for my mind to fit around. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held a conversation with someone besides myself or the page that I was drawing on, and the page understood only the language of shapes and shadows, positive and negative spaces, not vocabulary, past and present participles.
I was in an isosceles trapezoid kind of mood.
I’d refused so long to go down to the cafeteria that they’d finally given up trying to make me go down and had brought food to me. I wasn’t hungry, though, and I just stared at it. I’d started to eat, I took a couple bites of sandwich, you know? But I really wasn’t in the mood.
I settled for drawing the tray.
I was in the middle of shadowing in the teeth marks in the sandwich, where I’d bitten but not completely torn away the food, when the lead of the pencil snapped and flew across the desk. The little tip of lead rolled on its side in a circle around the center tip, slowly zeroing in on itself. I watched it until it stopped spinning naturally, and then stared even more intently at it.
I felt like it had died, and I could feel the grief of the murdered pencil in my stomach. I dropped the yellow wood body of it onto the desk and stared at that. I didn’t have a sharpener. I stared at the useless, broken pencil and its murdered lead tip and bit my lips together between my teeth, frowning severely.
Finally, I reached for the lead tip and used it until it was dust on my fingertips, trying to finish shading in the contours of the sandwich. I used every ounce that lead had to give me, and finally even what had become dust on my fingers was gone, and all that was left was the darkness of it sunken into the pores of my fingerprints.
I stared at the drawn tray and compared it to the real one. I picked out every flaw, every misshapen line, every shadow pulled too far… I felt frustrated. I couldn’t even do this right. It was all that was left, it was all that I had, and I couldn’t even do that. With anger swelling in from my guts into my heart, lungs, arms, neck and eyes, I reached for the top of the page and I tore it directly down the center, my fingers gripping random sections of the page and ripping it manically, letting the pieces flutter around the room, the shards of what the pencil gave its life for falling like confetti, dusting the ground.
I looked down at the mess I’d made and felt like crying.
After what had felt like hours, I crawled back onto the bed and pulled the blanket up over my head, burying my face into the pillow. I imagined never leaving the room again. I heard the door creak open and I held still. I didn’t feel like having a conversation with anybody. Whoever it was crossed the room and took my tray, muttering because I hadn’t eaten and the mess of paper on the floor.
When the door closed behind the person, I lowered my blanket just enough to peek out and breathe.
She’d left a new pencil on the desk.
I wondered, staring at it, how long I could live in an environment where the best thing that had happened to me all day was the appearance of a sharpened pencil?
