From age five, Sara believed she could own the world.
She believed it even when her parents lost their house and they all had to move into a cramped apartment with peeling paint and missing window panes. She believed it until she was twelve and her eight year old sister Penny died.
The cause had been a bicycle accident in which Penny had swerved into a ravine to avoid getting hit by an oncoming car, and had hit her head on some big rocks.
On the day of the funeral, 12 year old Sara stood in the rain beneath a drooping umbrella and watched the small casket wreathed with flowers and teddy bears being lowered into the ground. As the preacher intoned a farewell full of hopeful verses, Sara did not feel like she owned the world anymore, or ever could.
Why had she ever believed anything so silly anyway? Well, it had all started with the doll.
At age five, she had been getting over a cold while drawing a doll with caramel colored ringlets and a frilly dress. The doll had belonged to the kindergarten and had looked like someone Sara wanted to be, someone kind and beautiful. Sara had longed to take it home.
The doll had worn a hint of a smile, but Sara had drawn it with a full grin. Drawing it just as it was had bored her. She had imagined the doll walking, singing, and running along a beach. On paper she tried to make the doll look like it was walking, one leg bent.
Aside from her changes, the doll was the most realistic picture she had ever drawn. Sara had caught some key quality, something of its delicacy and sweetness. Sara stared at the doll, then back at the drawing.
Suddenly the image of the doll changed. For a startling moment its face appeared to rise from the flat paper, as if the rendered doll was trying escape. Sara gasped but by the time she had reached to touch the face, it had merged back into the paper.
Sara had blinked several times, her heart pounding. What had happened? Was drawing magic?
Much later Sara would reflect that she had been getting over a bad cold at the time; maybe the “vision” had been caused by a fever or the cough syrup, but five year old Sara did not think about that.
Magic or not, in drawing Sara had stumbled onto a great power: To draw was to own; at least it had felt that way. She had taken the doll into herself and re-created it. Could she own clouds that way, or buildings, or the sun and the moon? She thought she could. She imagined that if she could draw things just as they were, she could own anything she saw.
She began drawing what she liked: butterflies, cats, dogs, moons, and carousels, imagining that one day they would all rise from the drawing paper like the doll had done. The moon would escape the paper and rise high into the night sky, the butterflies would go fluttering off the page, and the carousels would spin and play music, as the horses rose and fell.
As Sara got older she continued to draw, seeking to capture the essence of whatever she saw, hoping the magic would happen once again. Even when it never did, Sara never lost her belief in the power of drawing as a way to own the world.
When Sara was nine, her five year old sister Penny would stand next to Sara and watch her sister with wide-eyed amazement as Sara sat drawing at her desk. Penny always seemed to sense when Sara started to draw because she would show up out of nowhere, bringing with her the scent of minty chewing gum.
Sara loved Penny for seeming to grasp what Sara had always understood: Art was magic.
Sara found an echo of her belief in her art class. Her teacher had shown the students slides of cave art, saying that no one knew why thousands of years ago, human ancestors had drawn animals on cave walls, but Sara understood why; she understood perfectly. They had drawn them to own what they did not have.
But to her disappointment, nothing ever rose from the paper again. It was not so bad. Drawing still mattered. It was a celebration of sight. To draw an object was to know it, to absorb it, to grasp its essence, to become part of it.
But now, standing in the rain, Sara thought she had been all wrong. She knew who really owned the world. It was not cave artists, not world rulers, and not Sara. Death let you think you could own things, including yourself, but in the end it swallowed you. One day it would swallow the whole world.
If Sara could not own death, she could not own anything, let alone a planet. She could not fathom death either. She thought of the doll often during the days that followed the funeral.
She liked to imagine she could bring her sister back, make her rise the way the doll had risen so long ago, so Penny could stand behind Sara like a shadow again and watch Sara draw like before.
For a time, Sara brainstormed ways she could re-create her sister the way the ancient cave artists had re-created animals. She made many drawings of Penny and ended up in tears. At night she would pick over her supper, take only a few bites, and push her plate away.
The dining room was always dim, lonely, and silent, even when her mother was there eating with her.
One day Sara could not bear the silence inside her house. Without Penny, the whole house seemed dark, cold, and vacant. It seemed that death had come to her home like an obnoxious uninvited dinner guest, propped up its feet, and ordered everyone to lay low, to hide, to cower.
In her bedroom Sara gathered all her drawings. It was time to test their power once and for all. They were worthless if they could not help her now. She wanted magic to happen as it had long ago when she had made her crayon doll rise – or seem to rise – from her drawing paper.
She waited, but nothing happened. Her vision blurred, and her head felt like it would float away.
Suddenly she felt silly. What happened in kindergarten must have been a false memory or a fever induced hallucination, and she had let it affect her whole life.
All these years, she had thought she knew how to own the world. It had been a secret that had given her hope even when she saw kids who had far more than her.
Now an invisible fist gripped her throat, and tears began winding their way down her cheeks. One of them passed her chin, paused there, and struck the one of her drawings on the floor. She sank to her knees, her head bowed and her eyes closed.
Something warm and a little heavy fell gently on her hair. At first she smelled a minty fragrance and, when Sara raised her head, she saw a girl.
The girl looked like her sister, smelled like her sister, and smiled like her sister.
Sara sniffed and said, “Penny?” She rose, reached toward Penny, and touched a cheek to see if her sister was real. It felt soft and warm. “Are you real? Did I really bring you back to life?”
“Not exactly,” Penny shrugged. “I was alive before you called me. And dead, and something in between.” Penny furrowed her forehead. “Hard to remember if I was alive before I was dead, or dead before I was alive.” She shook her head. “Time is stranger than anyone knows.”
Setting aside the strange words, Sara thought, this is not Penny, not the Penny I remember, not the baby sister who had once looked up to her. This Penny was too knowing, a frightening stranger. Still, Sara wanted to believe the phantom was Penny. She wanted to understand.
“How can you be both at once?” Sara asked. “Dead and alive, they cancel each other out. And time; it only goes one way. How could you have been dead before you were alive?”
“I still feel confused about so many things,” Penny said, “but I do know time is not what it seems to you, not something outside you. Time is movement, just like life is movement. Without time there is no death, but no life either. Time is a cycle of starting and pausing, and we are part of it. It never stops, it only seems to sometimes. We inhale it. We move inside it. You could even say, we are it.”
Sara frowned. “Time killed you,” she said. “One day it will kill me and everyone I love.”
“Time does not kill us nearly as often as we kill it. You see time as cruel, but time is the greatest, maybe the only power we have. Every moment is like a canvas, or a cave wall we get to draw on. Time gives us the ability to act. Why do we imagine we could exist apart from it? We inhabit time. We breathe time. We are time.”
“We are time? What does that mean? You mean eternal? Like we live forever?”
Penny shook her head. “No, not eternal. I think we are eternity. At the birth of the universe, we were there, you and I, our potential stirring, unseen, among gaseous cloud of hydrogen atoms.
“And even before then, we were there, our potential to be alive existing inside of whatever there was, even if no one was there to see it. For an eternity stretching back into the past, you always had the potential to someday be alive just as you had the ability to someday die. If we exist, we have always existed, and will always exist.”
Her lips trembling, Sara said what she had never told anyone. “I used to think I owned the world.”
“You have never owned anything, Sara, and you never will. But owning is pointless. Moving is better. Moving and being moved. That is the power time gives us, to fill empty moments with movement. Be ambitious Sara. Forget about owning. Use the magic you have used to summon me, and create.”
To Sara the words were like warm water flowing over her skin. Penny rested a soft palm on her shoulder. “Keep drawing on the walls of time, Sara. Keep moving. And when you go, you will leave behind a record of your passage. And even if no one ever sees what you have drawn, time will never forget you, or it, because you are part of time and time is part of you.”
Momentarily comforted, Sara started to hug her sister, but before she could, her sister vanished and everything went dark.
Sara opened her eyes and found herself lying on the floor. She sat up a little and saw that there was a grey wet spot on the white paper of one of her drawings. Tears were clinging to her eyelashes as she looked all around. Had her sister really been there?
As the day went on, Sara tried to hold onto her new sense of purpose and understanding, but her sense of the miraculous faded. In her “vision” everything had seemed so beautifully clear. The words that had made perfect sense in the moment now had a hazy dream-like quality.
Sara avoided her sketch pad for days after her “epiphany.” Drawing seemed silly. Everything did. But after several days, she missed it. She went to her desk drawer where she kept her sketch pad, opened it, and withdrew her pad and pencils.
She flipped through the pages and saw what she had drawn. Some sketches were well drawn, others not. Many were of animals: cats, dogs, and ponies. In each she had tried to capture what was living in what she saw and pin it down like a butterfly collector does.
She had thought the goal of art was to capture what she did not have, to grab moments like butterflies from the air, to own them. Because she believed drawing realistically was the key to her magic, everything she drew appeared to be motionless. Her cats did not run. Her birds did not fly. Strange since, in the cave art she had seen, most of the animals had been moving: horses ran, deer leapt, bulls charged across the cave walls.
She turned to a clean page in her sketch pad. Holding her pencil, thinking of animals moving, she could feel something stirring inside her. It went down her spine and through her arm and into her hand. Thinking of what the ghost had said, she imagined time as being wind, and she inhaled it, felt it flow through, over, and around her.
What was it that had changed? In kindergarten she had thought the doll came to life because she had made part of it look real, but now she remembered she had changed it. In her mind and on paper, she had turned its partial smile into a grin.
Now she imagined a bird flying and began to draw it. Lines upsurged, went diving, spun around the animal and through it. She stopped for a moment to see what she had done. Her drawing looked real, but there was more to it. She had captured its motion.
A flash of light forced her eyes shut. A fluttering wind blasted her face and she heard rustlings, flapping, and a whoosh. Even before she turned her gaze to the windowsill she knew what she would find.
A bird dove from the windowsill, glided toward her, and landed softly on her shoulder. She slid her finger beneath it and looked into its eyes, wild, curious, dark holes that seemed to burn with the ancient power of the universe.
Breathless, she saw in the motion of its flapping wings the irresistible winds of eternity, and felt in them the power to look forward to the future and back into the past. To gain and to lose. To advance and retreat. To destroy and create. To move and be moved.
But most of all, to move.
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