After lying around for a while I eventually drifted off, and when I woke up my watch read four o'clock. I felt even more unsettled than I had that morning, a restless itch crawling around in my brain that I could not shake. After pacing my room for ten minutes going nowhere, I decided to get my painting out.
Art had always been the one thing that could quiet my head. Once I was in it, time moved differently and everything else faded out.
I set up my easel and pulled my paints from the drawer beside my bed, grabbed a small six-inch canvas and filled a glass with water. I settled into my dresser chair and looked out the window for a moment. The earlier rain had completely cleared and left a genuinely pretty spring afternoon behind, the sun sitting warm and golden in the sky above the treeline.
And so I painted.
