About

    She stared across the room at the lengthening shadows, twirling a pencil lazily between her fingers. On the floor around her, pencil shavings and torn pieces of paper lay in a heap.  With the snap of her wrist she threw her pencil across the room.  Click. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor. She fidgeted up and out of her chair and followed its path across the room. 

     Touching the wall with the tips of her fingers, she felt each notch left by her previous expressions of frustration. They created a pattern, a growing record of the hours she spent drawing or in today's case, erasing. She smiled slightly. Her drawing may not be improving much, but her aim certainly was. Bending down, she picked up her pencil and returned to her easel. 

    Sinking into her chair, her eyes narrowed as she squinted to separate the pools of light from their darker counterparts. Shadows were not dark, colorless worlds or simply the absence of light; there was presence there. Each time she came to this room to study the shadows, she searched for the ways they wrapped around an object, clinging to its form, but never attaching to it. At once transient and ethereal, fleeting, but dense--the intricacy of their edges alone held her attention. A shadow's edge, first soft in the morning light grows in sharpness as the sun rises overhead and lengthens in the waning, golden afternoon. 

     For hours now she had watched the shadows change. The challenge of capturing their subtlety frustrated her. But there was a rhythm in the making, the rhythm of the slight back and forth of her pencil that lulled her anxious mind. More than mindless, this rhythm was something substantial she could get lost in. 

     Daylight was fading with twilight stealing in to replace it. It was much later than she had realized. She squinted and stared at the wall again, and then rubbed her eyes.