When I’m older

Art by Deepak Pradhan

I sit down to carve the most intricate lines my paper had ever felt. I follow and follow the long tunnels of my imagination where I have this artistic light locked in my fist yet I run as if it’s too far from my reach.

Every time I set my eyes on a yellow leaf, cerulean sky, or a half-baked moon, I hoard all aesthetic souvenirs and dump them in my side pocket only to rush back home and draw all I can through my pounding heart.

In a world full of despair, distress, and stone faces, I wish to reach hearts through art. I wish to capture unlimited sky on a tip of my pen that sends everyone home with each word they read. I wish to tell a lonesome canvas how it can attract the attention of million eyes by letting me in. I’d be proud if I could turn a war-leftover stained glass into an essential part of an incomplete sculpture. I wish I could mix colors in the pouring rain and with every droplet touching them, igniting the power of love instead of hatred. I wish to create a fine masterpiece persuading people to live and die only when they are granted a grave. Never before that.

But when I sit down to produce such a knockout craft, I fail. It feels it’s never enough. There is always something missing. A single piece hiding in the corner, smirking at my quarter-poems and smudged outlines. Probably one day when I am older and freer like a child I will cover the world in my canvases.  

“When I am an old woman I shall let my art paint me through their mysterious strokes.”

©kanikachugh

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