Honesty Before Drawing

It begins in the gut
before the mind catches up—
a slow undoing that arrives after reviews.

A sinking,
not of failure,
but of not becoming.
It isn’t the critique,
but the body’s recognition
of something missing,
something that exists just beyond
the edge of the drawing.

After the review, I sat at Yale Cabaret,
watching A Spider Learns to Dance.
The Spider was told his dance was not honest,
and therefore not profound.
And I thought
maybe that’s what happens to us,
to our work, to our drawings.
Maybe the stomach revolts
when the design withholds its truth.
Maybe the gut feels the dishonesty
long before the line does.

That Saturday,
instead of lying on my soft carpeted floor
staring at the ceiling,
I dragged myself back to the studio.
Paper. Clay. Scissors. Hands.
I began cutting, molding—
listening, finally, to myself.

And suddenly I said it aloud:
I love color.

So I painted the roof bright yellow,
the ceiling red,
the columns black.
For the first time in a month,
I felt the return—
as if the body exhaled.

To be honest meant to risk being ridiculed,
to hear them call it the Yellow Thing,
knowing that yellow
was the only truthful choice.