Page 106 of Absorbed

Stacey looked at the jumble of images and words. One page had words in blue written like a sky background behind cotton-candy pink watercolor clouds. Another page had a sketch of a silhouetted couple in a warm glow at the end of a dark forest.

Ms. Moreno stopped at a page covered in dark, charcoal etchings, the face of a screaming child in the center, tearing at her hair. The words “afraid,” “alone,” and “abandoned” burned through the hellish scene in varying shades of crimson and orange.

She spoke softly. “My first few journals looked a lot like this page. If I awoke in the night, or got in a fight at school, I’d put whatever was frightening me on the page.” She closed the journal and tied the twine around it. “Then, once it was locked in here for a while, I could usually go back to sleep, or move on with my day. I was so angry, and my journal helped me stop wanting to hurt someone. Or myself.”

“I don’t know… I’m really worried about Jessie. How is some journal going to help?”

“You can’t do anything to help Jessie right now, Stacey. Only his doctors can. But you said you’re not sleeping well and are worried all the time. This will help with that, so hopefully you can be a better friend to him when you do get to see Jessie.”

“How many of these journals have you made?” Stacey asked, untying the bundle and flipping through more of the pages.

“Dozens. At first, I’d fill a journal like this in a few days. At the time, I really had no one else to tell all the horrible thoughts in my head. Sometimes I hated what I’d put inside these pages so much, and didn’t want anyone to ever see it, so I’d burn it in the fireplace. That was its own kind of catharsis.”

Stacey set Ms. Moreno’s journal down and picked up the blank booklet. “I don’t know what I could possibly put in herethat would get all of the horrible things that have happened out of my head.”

“You don’t have to be able to get them all out at the same time. What if you started with one thing on one page? Just one simple image? Something easy. Maybe something you think of when you consider how all of this difficult stuff started in the first place.”

“What if I don’t know how to draw it? Or it’s really dumb?”

Ms. Moreno set a pencil in front of Stacey. “Who’s ever going to see it? Put it on the page so it stops weighing you down. Worst case: burn it after. Remember, it’s just a piece of paper.” Ms. Moreno lifted her eyebrows knowingly.

Stacey snorted at the cheesy line Ms. Moreno tossed off so often. The art teacher collected paints and watercolor pencils, brushes, a mason jar of water, and a cup full of fine tip markers. By the time the supplies were on the table, Stacey had sketched on her first blank page, and was reaching for a palette, brush, and red and blue paints.

Ms. Moreno sat on her stool beside Stacey and opened her own journal to the next blank page. She grabbed a couple of markers and began writing in the center of the page, her words spiraling outward as she rotated the journal, writing in a circular design. Then she picked up a brush and started filling in the space around the words with ribbons of black, purple, and navy paint.

When Stacey set down her paint brush, Ms. Moreno did as well, and turned to her. “How did that feel?”

“Fine, I guess.” Stacey shrugged. “It wasn’t anything serious. Just…where everything started. Like you said.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Ms. Moreno asked.

“It’s really dumb.”

“You don’t have to share it at all. But I meant it when I said that anything you tell me can be just between us.” She showedher page to Stacey. “Would you feel more comfortable if I shared what I put down on my page? It’s nothing earth shattering, either. Most of my entries are repetitive. Reminders to myself.”

Stacey shrugged and nodded. “Maybe.”

“I wrote: Whenever my thoughts pull me down, and I feel myself sinking into a pit of my worst fears, the best way to escape is by pulling myself free through art.”

Around the edge of the pit of words she’d drawn a grassy field with flowers arranged to spell “Art Escape.”

Stacey nodded, then pulled her own journal between them. “You said I should put down something simple. How everything started. This is all I could think of.” She pointed to a simple drawing of a cardinal red one-piece swimsuit in the bottom left corner. “I had to buy a red suit when I got the job as a lifeguard. And this,” Stacey pointed to several paragraphs of blue text written in the shape of an inverted blocky letter L, “is the community pool. I just wrote about how it felt when I got the job, and how nervous I was to wear a swimsuit in front of the crew. Especially Jessie.” She pointed to a small sketch in the bottom right corner. “This is supposed to be the ThighMaster, next to my broken lava lamp from when I was trying to lose weight quickly.”

“I like all the details.” Ms. Moreno looked Stacey in the eyes again. “How do you feel?”

Stacey chewed the inside of her cheek. “A little better, I guess. I actually found the words flowing through my head as I drew, so it was easier to put them on the page after they drifted around in there for a while.”

“That’s interesting. Maybe something will pour out of your words that surprises you. Do you want to try to do another page?”

Stacey nodded, and picked up the pencil.

For the next three hours, Stacey poured her thoughts across page after page. One page she covered in music notes. She added a stage with her own face in the corner, painted like a melting clown. Another had the sun setting over the parking lot at the movies with Jessie’s gum-wrapper airplane in the gutter. She drew the Silver Bullet in an empty field under a starless sky on one page, and her giant dream catcher beside a pair of scissors on the page opposite. She sketched a tiny golf pencil beside an empty liquor bottle. She painted the Grand Canyon, with Gabe’s silhouette on one side and hers on the other. She drew a swirling blue hot tub with a bottle of pills, a pair of ice skates, a gold medal and the words “Future” “Hopes” and “Dreams” spiraling down the drain.

On the last page, Stacey painted the background watery blue with a large red splotch in the center. With a white pen, she wrote a poem over the bloody image. Stacey was surprised how calm she felt as she read her words aloud to Ms. Moreno:

“I sat in class and dreamed of him,

The skater with a wicked smile.

---