I Found A Leather-Bound Case In A Tree And I Really Wish I Had Never Found It

Among this swirl of new friends and acquaintances was Sarah. Sarah was a slender girl with freckles and dirty blonde hair that, at the time, I was sure was the most beautiful creature I ever laid eyes on. I fell for her hard in that teenage puppydog way, but I was sure she would never feel the same way about me, until I somehow found the courage to ask her to dance with me at the winter formal and, to my surprise, she kissed me at the end of the song. Sarah and I were a couple from that moment on and I couldn’t have been happier. Drawing took a total backseat to movie nights and walks in parks and awkward make-out sessions in our parents’ back yards.

One of the things I liked best about Sarah was her artwork. She was an incredible artist. She worked with pencil, charcoal, pastels, watercolors, acrylics, you name it, she could do it and it was all good. Better, certainly, than anything I could do, except perhaps with those pencils, forgotten almost entirely in a dusty desk drawer by that time. I loved her artwork, worshipped it almost as much as I worshipped her, but I never showed her any of mine. She didn’t even know that I did draw any further than the random doodles left behind on homework assignments.

One hazy summer’s day between 10th and 11th grade, my parents suggested I have Sarah for dinner with them. By this time we’d been dating around six months, and my parents had certainly met Sarah several times, but had never spent any real time getting to know her, and apparently they had decided that this was now long overdue. Although I wasn’t wild for the idea (what teenager would be?) I agreed, seeing how happy the thought made my mom especially. Looking back now I realize how much my mom must have worried about me in the years before 10th grade, when I was constantly brooding alone in my room, and she desperately wanted to get to know the girl who had helped bring me out of my shell.

Dinner went fine for the most part, until about halfway through the meal my mom brought up Sarah’s artwork, and how much I showed her work off to my parents and how they admired it almost as much as I did. This, by itself, did not upset me, but it was when my mom uttered her next question that my heart sank.

“Has he shown you any of his drawings?” my mother asked. Sarah looked at me incredulous.

“No, he’s never shown me anything of his,” she said, still staring at me curiously.

“It’s no big deal,” I muttered, praying for anything to change the subject, but naturally my mother started gushing about the quality of my sketches and how she thought I really should do more with my talent, etc, etc.

You see, though almost no one else had been privy to my private world of drawing, my mom had been. Every time she would come into my room to collect laundry or whatever, she would leaf through whatever recent sketches I had left out on my desk. I knew this because after she had done so I would find my previously messy papers stacked in a neat pile. Although it had always made me somewhat uncomfortable for anyone to see the fruits of those strange labors, I had always let it slide. She was my mother after all. In that moment, though, I cursed myself deeply for not having had the sense to hide those drawings away.

There was no way around it, after dinner Sarah first begged, then firmly insisted that she simply must see some of my artwork. Finally I caved, after all, I loved her in that silly, hormonal, teenage way people love each other, and was I really going to tell her no? So I showed her. Sarah was astonished. Certainly her art was better than even the best of these drawings, but she was blown away that I had had this “talent” and had kept hidden from her (as well as virtually everyone else) for all this time. She began to pester me about why I wasn’t signing up for art classes, why I hadn’t told anyone about this, why I hadn’t told her about this in particular.