I was alone in my studio again, and without Evan here it felt empty. I had worked hard to make it warm and inviting, but there was something terribly missing from it. It only took me a few minutes to figure it out.

It was his presence.

When he walked into a room, he filled it with this positive energy that was nearly impossible to describe. I wanted to capture that energy in my artwork of him. For a moment I was thinking of how grateful I was that when we met two weeks ago, I had the balls to go up to him and make him my model.

I shuddered at the thought of having to do this project with anyone else.

But Evan, I was so excited to study him. I couldn’t wait until he returned, so I could simply be around him again. Being around him made me feel… more free, is the only way to describe it. Less chained up in my own head.

Maybe this could work. He was giving me what I needed, which was freedom of creative expression, without even really trying. For some reason, when I looked at Evan’s form, I needed to channel it into something else.

For the first time in a long time, I felt inspired.

I had been a businessman for so long that I forgot what it was like to channel complete and free creative expression. When that was extinguished, my happiness was too, but it did so quietly, unnoticed.

But being around Evan seemed to reawaken that, like opening a trap door in a dungeon.

Maybe this could work. Maybe this could really, really work.

I worried about what he was thinking, though. Up until this point, Evan had been seen as straight. Would he announce our relationship in public? I wanted to be public with him, but I wanted to respect his privacy, and given that he used to be “straight,” allow him to take this one step at a time and match his pace. The only people that knew we were in a relationship were his old work colleagues at the restaurant.

I was so excited to introduce Evan to my friends and family out in Aspen. More than ever, I was so excited to show him a good time and make him happy; he was so stressed out about all of his work he had to do.

There was something about Evan, unlike any other previous lover I’d ever had, that made me feel whole. For the first time, I felt… safe in a relationship. I felt like it was okay just to be as I was.

And my work was taking on a new light. There wasn’t a moment that went by where I wasn’t thinking of Evan.

I’d been conditioned to be resistant to showing any kind of emotion by my ex, Kyle. He told me that getting too emotional was a waste of time so many times that I began to believe it.

Now when I needed that emotional energy that I used to have, it was nowhere to be found. He thought love was being business partners. I felt that part of me that all the color came from slowly atrophy without me even realizing it.

But here I was, noticing it blooming beautifully again. Being with Evan somehow was like feeling the warmth of spring after a long winter.

I rifled through my drawings of Evan. These did have a certain something about them, a certain depth.

As the evening wore on, I prepared to do my check-in with Professor Washburn. It would be the first time we’d met since she assigned this project.

Even though I knew this meeting was meant to establish the relationship between me and her and not to throw criticism at my work, I was nervous. The whole way up to the art school, I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong with this project.

The worst thing that could possibly happen was that she could take me off this project and decide to assign me something else, which would rob me of Evan’s time… though I didn’t see her doing that. There was some kind of maniacal twinkle in her eye when she watched me poach Evan.

There was an overwhelming feeling unfurling in my gut that she knew what was up.

But if she did decide to change the requirements of the project, if he wasn’t my model— if he wasn’t being paid to do it, would he still choose to spend time with me?

Shaking my fears away, I opened the door to the art school and stepped inside. The warm and earthy scent of sawdust greeted me. When I made my way up to her office, I saw the woman herself sitting behind a desk, staring studiously at her laptop. Strangely-shaped sparkling trinkets adorned the walls of her lair. As soon as I sat down in the chair across from her, she looked at me with that piercing gaze. But there was this warm gentleness about it that put me at ease.

“So Sam, how are you doing with this project?” She asked, folding her hands and shutting her laptop. “I know it’s an entire semester and a half long, but I assigned it to you because I know your work and I know you really need help in this area. Emotional expression is the core of art!”

If it were anyone else telling me that, I’d immediately go on the defensive. But Professor Washburn had earned my trust.

“It’s going well… I’m feeling very connected with my subject.” I said.

“Oh?” She said, her brown eyes glinting over her glasses at me.

I bit my lip. Had I done something wrong? Was a relationship between an artist and model forbidden?

My anxiety crumbled when she smiled, like it always did.

“I can already tell you’re different.” She said warmly.

How the hell could she tell? I crossed my arms and sat up straighter in my chair.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” She smiled kindly, chuckling a little. “I’m just saying that I’ve seen you grow a little. Now let’s see how your work has grown, shall we?”

I reached over to my right and picked up my big rectangular portfolio, laid it across the desk nearby, and unzipped it. Inside were all of my latest pieces of Evan, perfectly rendered in various poses. I plucked out two of them and presented them to her.

In my opinion, these two were the best ones. They were exactly as they were supposed to be; life-like. I was really proud of my rendering skill.

As I unfurled them before her, I knew she’d give me positive feedback.

She looked over them pointedly, not tilting her head down to take them in, but looking down her nose at them.

I felt uneasy.

Then her lips pulled back in a thin line as I saw the judgement cross her face.

“Something wrong?” I asked, my pride draining out of me like the sand in an hourglass.

“There’s nothing here.” She said.

I recoiled. Art professors could be so harsh.

“What do you mean there’s nothing there?” I asked, “I worked really hard on these!”

She sighed, then took off her glasses and looked up at me.

“What makes these different from a photograph, or a computer pencil rendering, other than you spending a lot of time on it?” She asked, emotionless.

There was a silence in the room as I tried to think my way out of this.

“I… it’s art. It’s a pencil drawing.” I maintained, not believing that my mentor was giving me such harsh criticism. This wasn’t unlike her, but I thought I was her favorite student.

“Look, you might think I’m being harsh, but I’m here to give you this feedback. I’m not going to handle you with kid gloves because I know you need this in order to grow.” She said, still scanning me with her eyes. “You aren’t like the kids that come to this school and treat it like some kind of extended high school years to goof off, or some of the students that treat it like a very expensive therapy. You are here to do something, and you have such potential, I can feel it!” She said passionately, waving her arms in a grand, sweeping motions.

“But you need to work on this.” She gestured to the renderings, “You need to work on taking what’s inside your heart, and transferring that to the paper. Do you understand?”

I was silent for a moment, trying to not let the critique affect me. I had spent hours and hours perfecting these two drawings, making sure that I had captured the way Evan’s body looked in the morning sunlight.

“What is it missing?” I asked patiently. I knew that after this I’d need alone time to process what she had said. My feelings were a little hurt.

“Style. How you feel. This is just a perfect image of what the rest of the world sees. But what happens when you look at something, and remix it in your head? What happens when you see a normal thing, like fruit, or an animal? Is the image in your mind, when you think about it later, the same thing that you saw? Or is it altered somehow? And in what way?” She finished.

I was so confused.

“That’s what I want to see from you.” She finished. “Did that make sense?”

No. “Yes.” I said, not wanting to give her reason for another tangent.

“All right. For now I’m going to mark you as okay for this check-in, but next time I want to see some progress. You have a lot of opportunity to make mistakes, you have a thousand pieces to create!”

I smiled, but it didn’t reach my eyes. “Thank you, professor.” Then I collected my pieces and put them in my portfolio, zipping it up with finality.

“Come back next week with something more raw!” She said brightly.

I wasn’t in the mood for this. I gathered up my portfolio and headed out of her office, carrying on through the long hallway. My footsteps echoed through the halls as the distorted, colorful faces of student work mocked me from the walls.

I leaned on the railing on the catwalk, set my portfolio down and sighed.

All that work—all that time I had put into those two perfect drawings was all for nothing. The professor wanted more… something, but wasn’t able to tell me what. Not exactly.

Typical artist.

But secretly I knew what she was looking for. She was looking for me to open up and let go; take my art more into the abstract.

Well, I could just make a shit ton of shitty line drawings of Evan and manipulate the assignment…

But then I took a deep breath and calmed myself. I was here in order to put myself through this. And I struggled in this area. I needed to learn to open up more.

I thought of Evan again, and how I felt around him. How I felt “awakened” by being with him, in his presence. There was something about him that set my soul on fire, and made me want to do certain things. I thought back to when I first started this journey to reawaken myself. The whole reason I started it was because I was reaching for something; something to save me from the endless churn and fake smiles of the business world.

Applied to art, it was no different. “What does the audience, want? Give them that,” But what Professor Washburn was getting at was different.

Art was tricky. True expression was going to take more out of me than that.