Cecilia had a difficult time remembering things. Her name. The date. Where she was. Who people were. It was just one of the side effects of getting old.
She had laughed when her friends began losing their memories, but suddenly it was not as funny when the tables were turned. She had enjoyed life. She had gone to school, started a career and traveled the world.
She had been an artist. A fairly good one at that. She loved drawing and painting people in their natural settings. They seemed so at ease. They seemed real. Each picture portrayed a different person, and each picture told a different story.
A mother washing her children’s clothes. A young brother protecting his sister by holding her hand as they walked down the street. A couple reuniting after a long separation. A father reading to his children as they fell asleep on his lap. A grown daughter comforting her ill mother.
She loved the kindness and love that shown in the eyes of her subjects. Cecilia had seen many kind acts in her lifetime, and she wished to share her experience with the world. Cecilia had never achieved any notoriety except for in her small hometown.
She was content. She did not yearn for fame or fortune, but for happiness, and beauty. True beauty that is not found in appearances, but in character. She had found, and lost beauty many times.
A slight smudge brought her back to reality. Reminiscing was pleasant, especially at her age, but it distracted her from her charcoal drawing. She drew quite frequently, and it was always whatever image appeared in her head.
The charcoal pencil held in her hand flew seamlessly over the paper. Cecilia’s hands had no hesitation whatsoever when it came to this drawing. She had the perfect vision of what she wanted to draw, and she was not going to allow it to escape.
As the charcoal began adding the finer details to her picture, she realized she was drawing wrinkles. Funny, she had originally set out to draw a picture of a landscape she remembered from France, yet here before her, stood a portrait. A portrait of a man.
She had no idea as to who the man might be. Probably a perfect stranger she had passed by on the street one day.
As Cecilia finished the portrait, she wiped her face. For some reason her cheeks were wet. She was crying.
Behind Cecilia sat countless pictures of the same man. She did not know who he was, and she never remembered that she had already drawn his portrait. She never realized she was crying until she was done with the portrait, and she never knew why she was crying.
The nurses around the corner whispered to one another. They prayed for and pitied the old beautiful artist who could not remember her husband.
Evelyn and Clark Blog 