Everlasting, Eternal, and Forever

“I don’t understand,” I keep telling her, but Mrs. Flemming just doesn’t seem to want to listen. She just keeps turning my head towards the painting, sometimes physically coaxing my neck so that my eyes are aligned with the swirling mass of blues and greens that are all together too different to be mixed and yet far too much a part of each other to be separate entities.

“Look,” she tells me, and I do. I am looking, I have been looking. I have been sitting here, staring at Starry Night for the past forty-five minutes, waiting for some giant epiphany to strike me down in the middle of the art room. Blood is starting to pulse through my forehead at an alarming rate – I have been frowning at this painting for far too long. My muscles long to relax and my brain is begging to be released from the chains of thought I’ve locked it into, but I know that I cannot show Mrs. Flemming that I am not at least trying.

“What do you see?” she asks me. I know she is expecting me to say something wonderful, something worthy of reproduction and quotation. That is what everyone expects of me. Never mind that I am only twelve and not at all concerned with the world around me. I’m a SEED child, a chosen one. Five days a week I am expected to churn out new levels of brilliance that dazzle even the most experienced of educators. I knew she wanted me to say something amazing, something beyond my scope, and so I did.

“I see colors, a mass of intermingling colors put in the sky in a way that only God could,” I tell her. Play to her faith, says a little voice in my head, and I do. “I look at that village, and I know that the people in those houses must know that God is in the sky, watching over them.”

She looks at me for what is perhaps too long of a time. I don’t like it when Mrs. Flemming looks at me. Her eyes are too bright, too wide, and she never seems to blink. “What do you feel?” she asks.

“I feel Van Gogh’s inspiration,” I say, deadpan. I know this is the answer she is looking for.
“That’s wonderful,” she tells me, and a smile starts to spread across my face. But then she speaks again, bringing my world crashing down as she asks in her too calm voice, “But what do you feel?”

“I don’t understand.”

She is making me sit here on this stool until I know what I feel, in this cold little room, while the other thirteen SEED kids get to go do a watershed experiment. I am only twelve, not at all concerned with the world around me, and I don’t want to be a chosen one anymore.

~.~.~

When I was six, my mother took me to my first real carnival. We went without my sister, who was only two and very annoying. Mom said that if I wanted to go to the carnival, I had to take a nap. This frustrated me very much. Didn’t she know that naps were for little babies like my sister and not for big girls who get to wear shiny black shoes with clicky heels and pretty dresses with ruffles on the sleeves? Naps are for people who aren’t old enough to stay up all day, or who are too old to stay up all day. Naps are for mommies and naps are for grandmas, and naps are even for doggies, but naps are definitely not for six-year-olds. I tried to explain all this to my mother, but she just wouldn’t listen. Her liquid black eyes fixed on me in a way that could both entice and terrify, a way I would later learn to emulate. No nap, no carnival, and that, young lady, happens to be the end of this conversation.

In the end, common sense had won out (or maybe it was just sheer exhaustion), the nap had been taken, and I was now free to enjoy the spoils of victory over my evil bed. The carnival is every six-year-old’s version of heaven. Where else can you eat cotton candy and caramel apples, and then ride the merry-go-round until you are quite positive that you will puke? I was determined to do all of that and more, so I started with the cotton candy. Burying my face into the wad of pink plush and emerging with nothing but a sticky mouth and a sugar high, I felt my eyes widen in surprise as my mother suggested something that both frightened and excited me.

“Would you like to ride the Ferris Wheel?”

My answer was a nodded head, my only possible form of communication as I was far too stunned to speak. I was silent, still, as we were buckled into the seat and the system of metal fingers, interlocked in prayer, set off from the ground. I looked around me and saw the heads of the people at the carnival, laughing and enjoying a rare moment spent with their children. Tomorrow they would rush back to the hustle and bustle of the work week and their children would once again be left with the nanny, but for tonight all that mattered was the caramel apples and the merry-go-round. As we ascended higher, I saw the entire carnival beneath me, the people reduced to specks, and the lights were thousands of angels, protecting every little boy and girl on the grounds. But as we reached the peak of the ride, all I could see was the sky, an endless expanse of black nothingness that contained everything.

“How do you feel?” my mother asked me, her beautiful smile lighting up her face as it so rarely did.

“I feel forever.”

~.~.~

“You can’t look at art and expect for something to come out of you,” Mrs. Flemming had told me when, after an hour and a half on the stool, I could still come up with nothing to describe how I felt. “When you look at art, you have to allow something to go into you, to become a part of you.”

I nodded to show that I understood, even if I didn’t. She released me from my prison of sweeping brush strokes and chaotic colors, and I ran into the hall where the painted yellow cinderblock would embrace me and bring me back to the mundane. I hated art class. I hated not having the right answers, the answers that Mrs. Flemming wanted. I hated not being able to tell her how I felt. I sat down in the hall and cried, great gumball sized tears pouring out of my eyes, brown eyes that today felt like endless wells of nothingness and water. Now that it was too late to tell her, too late to show the woman who expected greatness from a twelve-year-old girl who didn’t want to be smart, I knew. I knew how I felt.

~.~.~

“Why do you like that stupid painting so much?”

I turn around to see my younger sister, who will be thirteen tomorrow, as she stands in my doorway asking a question with unsmiling eyes that do not care to know the answer. She does not want to see into me, to learn more about the girl who came just under four years before her but often feels four years behind. Movies lie. Almost-thirteen-year-olds do not really get along with their almost-seventeen-year-old sisters, even if they both like to listen to the same bands on stereos with the volume turned up way too loud. Still, I answer her question, but only because it is dangling in front of me, a carrot in front of my very hungry eyes.

“Because I like the way it makes me feel.”

“How does it make you feel?” she asks with a sneer, waiting for me to say something so overwhelmingly stupid that she will no doubt be able to use it against me later.

“It makes me feel forever.”