This is a true story. As right and true as all those years of remembering can make it.

The only thing I recall about that day, that year, that godawful time in my life, was the portrait of the old man. He was a refugee from a war or famine, maybe a flood… I don’t recall. I guess you could say it was a godawful time in his life too. Anyway, I found his photo in the newspaper and knew I NEEDED to sketch it, because that was what I did back then. I sketched. I drew. I made art whenever I could. Which wasn’t too often.

Because I was in school, taking classes that sucked me dry like bones left out too long in the sun. Sensible classes. Mandatory classes. And when I wasn’t in school I was studying or waiting tables at a diner in the mall. Working late into the night, telling men two and three times my age I wasn’t interested. Then going home and doing the same thing the next day. School. Work. Assignments. And when I was lucky, when I could fit it in, the occasional soul liberating drawing.

But not often enough.

Pause here for the violins.

The portrait of the old man was pinned to the wall by the front door of the crappy duplex in the crappier neighborhood. A pencil sketch really, on cheap paper. I was on my way out to work one day, maybe school, but I stopped and studied it. And then I surprised myself and said with my real voice, not the voice inside my head that was always telling me bad things, “This is good. This really is good.”

And the boy slouched on the sofa, the handsome boy who spent his hours, his days smoking pot and not doing much else said, “Yes it is.”

The light went on inside my head, sparks, and I said, “I could be an art major.”

The boy who’d been sucking the life out of me for way too long sucked the weed deep into his lungs, holding it there and saying in a strangled voice as he tried not to exhale, “Yes you can.”

And I KNEW I was right. And he was right. And that was HUGE because we never agreed about anything.

So I became an art major. The joy came back into my life.

And the boy went out of it. Eventually.

As near as I remember that’s the way it went. Except I left out the drama. Because I was twenty years old, there was plenty of drama.

Until I learned to exhale.