By: Bailey Peters
I started drawing in elementary school, when I met her. She was sitting on one of the benches to the side of the woodchip-surrounded play structures. It was her fiery red hair that caught my attention first, got my head to lift and my eyes to wander from the play sets. It was her round rimmed glasses that made me sit up on the roped climbing set I was dangling upside down on. It was her flower-themed overalls that got me to jump off, narrowly landing on my feet. She looked like the photos of women that would come up if you searched ‘cottagecore,’ only in a younger body and shrunken clothes. However, it wasn’t the way she looked that made me run over, that made me sit with her, that made me speak. It was the notebook that was resting in her lap. The strokes that took up the page she was working on weren’t that of the childish doodles that all of the other kids did in their art classes and such. No, these were practiced, making a picture you didn’t have to guess the theme of through charades. It looked like the outline of a dog, the skeleton fitting the general shape.
The way her head popped up when I ran over was an indication that I had startled her, warranted considering my sudden appearance in her otherwise peaceful vicinity. “Whatcha doin?” My neck craned to see her paper, as if I didn’t have a full view of it from my own seat.
“Oh, um-“ she seemed stunned by the sudden intrusion of her space, but I wasn’t pushed out, “I’m drawing. I’m trying to get this dog right.”
“What do you mean? It looks like a dog.”
“No, no. It’s just…not right.”
She turned the notebook this way and that, looking at it from different angles as if distorting the proportions herself. I watched as she did this, but didn’t entertain it, “Well, you should take a break and play with us.”
I practically dragged the poor girl off of the bench, but didn’t make her leave the sketchbook behind. I made her show me every piece within its pages before I even learned her name: Elyse.
I had been out as gay since fifth grade, a few months before Elyse had started attending my elementary school. I didn’t have an ‘ah-ha’ moment that other people in my community had. There wasn’t really a time that I wasn’t out, and I knew after a few months of being with Elyse, dragging her around with me, that I liked her. Even as young as we were, in sixth grade it grew to the point where I couldn’t sleep as she would creep into my mind and nestle there for hours. A year after I had met her, there was no doubt in my mind that I was falling for her completely, a childlike joy filling me every moment we were together. She liked to watch anime, so I watched anime. She listened to Hatsune Miku, so I listened to Hatsune Miku. She enjoyed drawing, so I begged my grandparents to buy me a sketchbook and pencils.
My own art started out looking like concepts, a guessing game in a child’s drawing, as that’s what it was. Elyse and I would sit and draw during our free time at school. She would guide my own strokes and help me develop pictures that at least made some sense. I loved drawing, learning new techniques and applying them in different ways. No one could separate me from my sketchbooks. Only ever when Elyse wanted to see my work did they leave my hands.
It started out as a joke, surprisingly enough. I was texting her one night, talking endlessly to one another about whatever fandom we were obsessed with at the time. My grandparents had called my name, and I meant to text her ‘brb.’ I hadn’t realized until I got back to my phone that I had texted ‘babe’. Apparently, Elyse thought this was hilarious and we ended up calling each other that all the time, the pet name infecting how we spoke to each other in person as well. Our friends assumed that we were together, and we never corrected them when they mentioned it. The transition from friends to dating was as natural as breathing, and through a text one night we desired to start using the label of girlfriends. All this, from a simple joke. Maybe that’s all it ever was.
My art took off. I started striving to make bigger and more extravagant pieces. I had played around with different styles for a while, and finally I had settled on a more realistic format that suited me well. I enjoyed drawing people’s faces, experimenting with different types of facial features and body types, playing with concepts I had seen from others. I found that I had an easier time drawing larger figures. This means I had an increasingly difficult time drawing skinny, lanky bodies.
I had met a girl who also shared this love of drawing I had, and we liked to bounce ideas off of each other. She was helping me with this limited skill with body types, and I was showing her my attempt that I worked on the previous nights. It had been one of my favorite drawings I had ever done, all with pencil. I only worked with pencil – no colors, preferring the black and white look with the normal graphite. My friend looked over the picture, scrutinizing it before turning her attention to me, “It’s a good sketch!”
I felt confused and disheartened. Sketch? This was the final piece. I was done with the drawing and felt there was nowhere else I could go with it. I asked her why she thought it was a sketch, and she pointed out all the white spots I had left, dotting the page between strokes of my pencil. I didn’t understand. The piece had to be finished like this. Elyse would understand it.
Elyse’s parents were different than my grandparents in their views of people like us. They were strict Christians and even stricter parents. I had never been to her house, but she would tell me stories of her mother and how she wouldn’t allow Elyse to do almost anything outside of school. I had invited Elyse to join my Dungeons and Dragons group, and when she asked her parents, they simply claimed that the game was Satanic and that their daughter would have no part in it. I was not Christian and had not been raised that way, and these views were foreign to me.
Apparently, our differences weren’t enough for her mother to ban my existence from Elyse’s life. She even asked if I wanted to go out with her and Elyse one day. It had felt like a date, only if her mom wasn’t sitting across from us in the booth at the pizza joint. We barely spoke, a fear of upsetting the woman who had brought us here legible in both of our bodies. It was when we left to go to the skating rink that we both got to relax, as we could talk freely as we glided around with one another.
Elyse wore rollerblades, and my dad had taught me some odd years back to ride on exclusively the four-wheel skates. As one can imagine, this meant that we were going at very different paces as we made our laps around. One of us would usually have to speed up or slow down, and by the middle of the experience we took to practically screaming at each other from across the rink. Her mother apparently noticed this, and she waved us down at one point to advise us to hold hands as we skated. I tried my hardest not to laugh out loud. I was trying my best to not do anything that would give us away, and her mother simply told us to touch. I readily took Elyse’s hand in mine to continue around the rink. I kept my hold tight, as I felt she wasn’t holding my hand back.
During our time in seventh grade, Elyse and I weren’t talking as much. The cut-off between us was sudden at the start of the semester, and we simply never saw each other. It had been a good two months into the new school year before I had gotten a text back from her. I had been frantically texting her while trying to hide that it was frantic. I was feral at the sight of the single text from her, almost accidentally flinging myself out of my bed from excitement and surprise. I consumed the text, the wide smile from my face fading as my eyes went over the large block of words.
She was stressed. Very stressed, she emphasized. She was dealing with anxiety – medically, that she had not told me about. She once again repeated that she was stressed and eventually got to the point she was so carefully dodging around; she wanted to break up. She put it in the perception of ‘taking a break’, but the way I wanted to vomit didn’t make me feel that’s what she meant. She reassured me that she was still my best friend, and she wasn’t breaking up with me because she didn’t love me. In fact, she “kind of liked me.” I could taste bile.
I stopped drawing. I felt picking up a pencil was hard, and the idea of creating any of the images that came to my head hurt. What could I even consider drawing? All of my art was sketchy, grey with white blots. I didn’t see a point in making the lifeless strokes. I wouldn’t make anything like I had before.
We ran into each other in the library at the end of seventh grade, a few months after we had broken up, both of us invited to a study group we had no idea the other was a part of. We didn’t speak to each other. We smiled and laughed as others talked to us, and I couldn’t help but stare at her the whole time. We hadn’t texted each other much after Elyse declared her desire for a break. I had taken the whole ordeal as a breakup, thinking she was through with me. Even with the statement of her wanting to remain good friends, we never seemed to have that same connection as before – that same spark. It was obvious as we eventually spoke to one another, roped into a conversation we were having vicariously through another friend. She smiled, but it was never at me. Never for me.
I got a text that night, Elyse surprising me with the suddenness of contact after two weeks of nothing. She told me that she noticed how awkward things were between us and equated it with the awful way she had broken up with me. She apologized for it, describing the depressive episodes she was having at the time of her initial break-off with me. She claimed that she still loved me, and asked if I wanted to get back together with her. Two major questions ran through my mind as I read those messages. The first was how her use of ‘love you’ was so much different than her ‘like you’ in the messages previously. The second was that despite her apology in speaking to me through text to break up with me, she was texting me now just as she had before.
Of course, I said I wanted to get back together. I was clingy when we were together, and in our months apart I had become less lovesick and, instead, simply sick. I stressed that if she did not want a relationship, then I did not blame her and did not want her to pressure herself into it. She said she wanted it, however, and just like that, we were dating again. It was surreal, really, but different. We were around each other much more once again, but it wasn’t like before. She would do as she normally did, not holding my hand back and avoiding getting close when we were around her parents, but I noticed it more. It made me doubt her words, as her actions did not mirror her supposed love.
My abilities with art had been a rocket ship, up and up and up beyond the clouds. Now it felt the ship had reached the stars and was floating among asteroids, still without anything to push it forward. It wasn’t plummeting back down to Earth; I could still draw, I hadn’t lost the ability even after I took my long break from my sketchbooks, but I felt like I wasn’t growing anymore. I was stuck, floating in the weightlessness of space. I wasn’t happy with anything I made, wasn’t happy with my lack of progress. I couldn’t draw anymore. Again, not literally, but it no longer brought me joy. Even the thought of it hurt me, because I remembered what I had made before and became envious of my past self. How dare they articulate themself well. How dare they be happy with the wonderful images they imagined and brought to life.
Eventually Elyse and I started going everywhere together once again, as if the breakup never happened. I remembered the event clearly, but I decided if Elyse wasn’t going to act on this then neither was I. The people around us never really registered the breakup, and I was convinced our friends simply never knew it happened. As time went on, I got comfortable in the relationship again, letting myself feel that childlike wonder I had back in sixth grade. Soon enough, seventh grade turned into eighth, and eighth turned into ninth. In our freshmen year of high school, others laughed as they said that Elyse and I were practically married. We had been together four years, counting the months we had been apart. I’d laugh along, proud of the fact that I had gotten a relationship that lasted so long even with the hardship we had faced.
As the length of our relationship was pointed out to me and how serious it must have been because of it, I was often asked what I was going to do for homecoming. I did not like school events, and the thought of being shoved in a small space with hundreds of students with bright lights and flashy clothes made my skin crawl, but I thought about how romantic it would be if I could take her out to such an event. I decided I would ask her out to it, where she readily agreed. We both started planning our night together right away, and planned to discuss it further during Halloween night, when we went back to her house after Trick-or-Treating around her neighborhood.
I loved Halloween, but that night all I could think about was us discussing homecoming, talking about what we were going to wear, planning everything together to make it perfect. That never happened. When we had gotten back that night, I sat silently in her pristine white living room as Elyse and her mother spoke. We never got a private moment to discuss anything. The closest we got was Elyse’s mother talking about homecoming.
“Do you have a boyfriend for homecoming?” Elyse’s mother asked her almost teasingly. I couldn’t help but smile at the question, even as it made my heart heavy. I was the boyfriend, I kept thinking to myself. My grin was wide, and a laugh almost slipped from me when Elyse caught my look first, staring at me with alarm.
“No,” Elyse’s words towards her mother were quick, “I don’t have a date.”
My smile was gone fast, and I stayed quiet even as I was taken home.
I was still determined to make it to homecoming. Walking into the gym then made out to look like a cheap disco was disorientating and dizzying, and though I had an immediate panic attack from the blaring music and franticly flashing lights within the otherwise dark room, I forced myself to continue my way in. Eventually, my cousin found me looking sick from the overdrive to my senses and led me to where Elyse was, and soon, I found myself less ill as the night progressed, the joyous feeling of being with the one I loved replacing the sickening feeling of the bright lights and loud noise for a time. We didn’t move much from the couch, didn’t speak. I let Elyse play on my phone nearly the whole time, simply assuming she wasn’t into this scene either. The romantic evening I played in my head over and over had shattered as we simply lounged about for the first half of the night, until some friends of ours finally dragged us from the couch and onto our feet to actually move about. I tried my best to stay with Elyse, clinging to her arm everywhere we went so she couldn’t go far. I willed her to stay near. At some point one of our friends came over to us, asked if Elyse and I were dating. Elyse didn’t answer. She would come back multiple times that night to ask the same question. I was puzzled.
Our last words that night were during our parting as her mother picked her up and I waited for my grandparents to pick me up from the grass outside of the school. Many people had left by that point, and I didn’t think any of my friends were still loitering around the field, until that certain girl came over to me once again, “So, are you and Elyse dating?”
“Yes, yes we are,” I laughed, trying to keep the sound of dread from the noise, “Why do you keep asking me that?”
She looked around as if to check for eavesdroppers, and only then leaned close to me to whisper what would haunt me far past that night: “During class, whenever anyone asks Elyse, she says you two aren’t together. It didn’t fit what you were doing tonight.”
I went home and cried. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t understand what this even meant. In a fit of rage and sadness I texted Elyse, asking if she even loved me. I wouldn’t get an answer as I fell asleep with my face wet, not having even bothered to take off the nice jumper I wore special for this awful night. I woke up to her text the following morning, a half-baked answer to my question. According to her and her small text, she had never asked to get back together with me, said she didn’t like me like that anymore. I immediately went back to our text where she had contacted me about getting together, trying to analyze her text and see if I had misinterpreted her. I was convinced that I had not when reading over her line, “I don’t know if you’re still open to a relationship but if you are I’d be happy.” To which I responded with, “I am open to a relationship, and it would really make me happy if we were together again.” That seemed more than confirmation enough that we had gotten back together. I wanted to argue that, show her that I wasn’t crazy for being under the assumption that we were together, that she was simply trying to gaslight me out of a relationship – but I didn’t have the energy for it. All I had the energy for was to respond with, “Okay.”
My art supplies have sat untouched, collecting dust in my closet for over a year. I lost the motivation, lost the drive that I once had. But now, as I open my closet and look at old memories, old pictures that came from my own hand, I feel that bubble in my chest that I got whenever I had a new idea of what to draw. The need to create. I pull out my newest notebook, dusty and half full. Flipping through the pages, nostalgia hits me, remembering the fandoms I was so enamored with that I was compelled to commit them to paper. I will myself to take a deep breath, and then I move my pencil. The feeling is foreign to me at first, my outlines looking more abstract and blocky than they once had. Slowly, however, I began to find my footing, and draw.
Bailey Peters is a Game Design and Development Major at Kennesaw State University and is excited to have “Art of a Young Couple” as their first publication. They love interactive storytelling and hope to write for TTRPGs and video games in the future. They are currently working on a text adventure game, and their Instagram is @bailey._._maple.