The one where she realizes how far she's come.

It's 2 am and after being awake for the last hour in the dark, she finally concedes and gets up. It is cold in the house, she wraps up in her favorite alizarin crimson Dr Who length scarf. She puts the kettle on. There are so many words ricocheting in her head, she visualizes them spilling out like marbles and rolling into the corners of the room.

Things are not perfect in her world and she doesn't want them to be. Things are pretty okay though. She hits the replay button on the song. She drinks her hot tea, it burns the roof of her mouth. Her mind turns to art. So many things have happened with her art that she never imagined, but at the same time she can't imagine them not happening either. She has been working on her art for so long now, showing it in galleries for the last fifteen years, since she was twenty three. It came about so organically when a friend saw her work on her apartment wall in Oregon. A painting of a shy demon with big eyes. She smiles when she thinks back to the painting that was her first entry in a long string of juried exhibitions. School came and went, she was in and out of her element, older than many of the students yet younger than some. She remembers feeling so old at twenty seven when she graduated, as if she had missed the boat, but today at thirty eight she feels like she has just been born.

Her work has changed and grown, always evolving over the years, not staying stuck in any one place for too long, yet always consistent within each series and new body. As she gets older her work is becoming more personal and perhaps even more romantic as she settles into this role of story teller and artist and as she realizes this is her true calling, and it is too late to turn back now.

When she doubts this, she reminds herself that people from all over the world own her work, not just a few people but a lot of people. She reminds herself that she has made and sold hundreds of paintings. Hundreds of incarnations out of thin air, hundreds of stories and secret wishes pulled out of the ether and realized in painting form.

Her mind drifts as she looks down at her glowing computer fingers. She hits replay on the song once more and smiles.

There was more to it than this...(and there always is).

* you can read this in the first person over on my blog.. But I wrote it here, this way, first. x.