“Draw anything.”
Those words echoed in my brain as I sat down staring at my pen and paper.
“Just draw what you see.”
So I looked up to the hill I had just climbed and awkwardly started to push the pen around on the paper. It was a very crude sketch of the hill, but it was SOMETHING… a small step in the right direction.
It was the only thing I drew that day, but it was enough.
The next day at work I looked at a cute teddy bear in a coffee cup and sketched it out. It turned out well, although it was very much in my cartoon style. I yearned for something more but wasn’t quite sure what that was yet.
Next came little doodles with very cryptic messages to me.
Me walking up from the ashes. Yeah, that felt about right.
Then a curvy line with my son on one side and me on the other. Around each curve I wrote, “Silence flows between us like a river.” Yeah, that felt right too.
He was only 12 but very much a teenager. Rushing through dinners so he could escape to his Xbox, leaving me to decipher what the grunts and one words replies really meant.
I knew he could talk. I heard the shouting in his room. He just had nothing to say to me.
I was glad that he was home, that he was safe, but I missed him.
I missed that cute and cuddly kid who came into my life just two years before.
The pen was my new pal now.
But still…
This new normal was lonely.