22. That’s Where I Draw the Line
That’s Where I Draw the Line
SARAFINA
Sloane grunted, attempting to pry the lid off my stubborn bucket of paint, muttering to herself when she broke a nail. As she cracked the paint bucket open, I realized this was the farthest I’d ever gotten. In all these weeks, I’d never even opened the damn lid.
She grunted victoriously and then we both stood over the bucket, peering into its inky darkness, as if it held some kind of magical dark power. An ominous black hole ready to consume the entirety of my art studio. I wanted to climb right in and sink to the bottom.
“You could just dump it onto the canvas.” Sloane offered indifferently, still staring into the depths of my uncompromising assignment.
“That feels like cheating.” I countered. I had to do something of meaning with it. Otherwise, what was the point?
She sighed. “You’re making things harder on yourself than you need to.”
“I’m not making anything hard, it just is hard.” I snapped and then immediately covered my face with my hands and groaned. “I’m sorry.” This wasn’t like me, but I was so edgy all the time, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
“Don’t be sorry. You have absolutely nothing to be sorry about. You need to yell, shout, break shit—do it. I’m not going anywhere, Sara.” She raised a perfectly waxed brow, promising, “I can take it. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
I think a part of me knew I needed Sloane’s thick skin, and I realized that out of everyone, that’s why I’d called her. She could handle me being an asshole, and we’d still be fine.
When I pulled my hands down from my face, Sloane was staring at me, and my skin prickled as I saw her make a decision in her eyes.
What exactly she’d decided in that moment, I didn’t know, but I immediately went on defense.
I suddenly wished I would have called Jules, because not only could Sloane take shit, she could give it too, and I could tell she was just about to fling some right at me.
I was about to get a love filled, ass kicking. Fuck.
“Do it, Sara. Dip the brush in and make a stroke on the canvas.” She instructed me firmly.
I scratched my neck. It wasn’t even remotely that simple. “I have to plan, I need to sketch, back paint, prep the canvas.”
“That is not the point of this, and you know it.” She said. “Just put the paintbrush on the canvas. Just one tiny little stroke.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.” She implored, and I couldn’t breathe as I shook my head no, suddenly regretting calling her.
“You’re a brilliant artist, Sara. Fucking brilliant.
Your mother would want you to keep going.
” She pushed harder, and the walls started closing in, and I knew what was coming.
I was going to have another panic attack. “Your mother would want?—”
“Well, she’s not here, is she?” I shouted desperately, fighting the cascade of bodily responses that were taking over. Fuckerson, it was happening again.
“How much weight have you lost?” Sloane’s voice was calm, and there was love in her tone but also brutal, stark accountability.
I dropped my gaze, heart racing so fast I felt like I could puke. “I don’t know.”
“How much weight, Sara? ”
“I don’t have a scale.” I knew the number.
Sloane’s expression turned both compassionate and terrifying.
“You are skin and bones. You are literally starving yourself, and if you keep it up, you’re going to kill yourself.
Like actually.” Tears welled up in my eyes as she asked more softly.
“Is that what you want? To die?” I honestly didn’t know the answer to that question.
I was just so fucking tired, wanted it all to stop.
Wished I could tap out for just a minute, just to catch my breath.
She didn’t move, and I didn’t move. An invisible string held us exactly where we were.
“You have so many people who love you so desperately; all you have to do is let them love you.”
“I’m alone.” My lower lip quivered.
“You’re not.”
“I am.” I trembled. “You don’t understand. How could you?”
“You’re right. I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I’m here for you anyway. You have Liam, Jules, Ariana.” Sloane laughed. “You have Cade and Theo, you have your father, your cousins.” And then she added knowingly. “You have Carter. ”
“Carter hasn’t texted me in over a month.” I snapped before I could think better.
“Yes, he has.” She argued, brow arching with skepticism.
“What?”
“Sara, he texts you every day. Texts me, asking if I’ve heard from you. He’s worried, and he cares about you so freaking much. Why are you ignoring his calls again? I thought you two made up?”
“I never got a single call.” I countered quietly, feeling dizzy.
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know. He got a new phone, but he’s been calling and texting you. Every single day, Sara.”
I stared into the paint.
“Choose to live, Sara. Not this shell of a human being, not this strange commitment you have to your own suffering. Choose to live.”
“I am,” I said defensively. “Every day, I drag myself out of my bed when I just want to lay there and rot.”
“And I’m so damn proud of you for that, but it’s not enough. You have to do this. You have to put this paint on the canvas.” She hesitated. “Not for your mother. For you . This is your big, beautiful life, Sara, and it’s the only one you get.”
My lower lip trembled, but everything else was frozen.
“Fine, if you won’t do it, I will.” Sloane grabbed a random paintbrush and headed for the bucket of paint.
“No!” I screamed, lunging to rip the brush out of her hands. “I can’t do it, okay? I can’t fucking do it! I can’t live in a world where my mother doesn’t exist—I can’t try to make beautiful things when she’s dead. She’s fucking dead, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” I sobbed.
Sloane crushed me in a hug, refusing to let go of me when I struggled.
Her voice was softer and more gentle in my ear.
“Then don’t make beautiful things. Make ugly things, make sad things, make compelling things, but make something, anything at all, because anything is better than this .
” She squeezed me tighter. “Don’t die with her, Sara.
You lost your mother, and I feel like I’m losing my best friend.
” She cleared her throat. “I know this is selfish, but I need you. If you won’t do it for yourself or for your mother—maybe you could do it for me?
I’m begging you to try.” We sank to the floor, and she held me while I sobbed.
Ugly, dirty, raw vulnerability, the kind that would push most people away.
But she hugged me through it all and didn’t let go.
When my crying had slowed, I felt the long handle of a paintbrush as she pushed it into my hand. “I can’t.” I cried.
“You can.” She was crying too. “I know you can.”
“I don’t know how to do this. I’ll never be able to make anything beautiful again.”
“Then make grief art, make hate art, make something, anything, just to remind yourself that you’re fucking alive.
” She gripped my hand and gently pushed the brush into the bucket, even as my hand trembled.
“You’re alive, Sara, whether you like it or not, you’re still here.
So let go of the past and choose to live.
Otherwise, you might as well have died with her.
” Sloane let go of my hand with a tremor in her own voice. “But I’m so glad you didn’t.”
I sobbed as I moved the brush over the canvas, letting big imperfect globs drop onto it, and then I lowered my hand and made a line. One single line. The feel of the brush against the canvas, scratching an itch I’d long forgotten about.
I stared at that black line for what felt like an eternity, and then I screamed.
I kept screaming as I threw the paintbrush across the room and plunged my hands into the paint, scooping, and dumping, and heaving it onto the canvas with my bare hands.
Smearing the paint violently, until the canvas was completely black, until I was covered up to my elbows, my clothes ruined, my hair matted.
Breathless, I narrowed in on the colorful paintings stacked against the wall. I fucking hated them. Had fantasized about destroying them for months now.
I hadn’t known shit when I’d created those joyful, happy, colorful paintings.
I’d been an ignorant rainbows and butterflies child that didn’t know a damn thing about the world.
About real pain. About grief. I’d been na?ve, and stupid, and ignorant, and those paintings deserved to burn, right alongside my old life.
I wanted my old art to disappear into the ether, never to exist again, and I decided maybe that was okay, maybe that was what I had to do.
The thing I’d been guiltily considering this whole time.
I had to burn something to the ground before the despair inside me consumed me first.
Throat raw from screaming, I didn’t say a word as I grabbed that first canvas and dragged it across the studio, already my black handprint ruining the corner.
I threw it onto the floor and lifted that heavy-ass paint bucket, because even if I was struggling, I was stronger after carrying it around all these weeks. I poured the entirety of it out onto that massive canvas and ruined it, one palmful of cheap black paint at a time.
When I was done with that one, I grabbed another, and another—sliding the pool of paint from one canvas to the next, scooping it off the floor, making it stretch as far as it would, until nearly all the pieces were ruined.
Some were completely covered, some just a single angry slash when I’d lost interest and moved on to the next one.
So entranced in the task at hand, I’d almost forgotten Sloane was in the room with me. When I finally looked up, transported back from wherever it was I’d gone, she gently called my name, saying, “It’s empty. You did it.”