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Yes, I have experience with this medium, but I haven’t worked with spray paint in a long time, and I’ve never tried anything this big. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off, even with Jesse's help. At least not in one afternoon.
But when I take a step back, my breath catches.
We did this.
We made this beautiful thing.
It’s not elaborate. Not a Rembrandt, not an intimately detailed landscape that would take a master months to flesh out.
It’s more like a frame from a graphic novel, or a street sketch captured on the fly, but it works. Art doesn’t have to be elaborate or detailed to be affecting.
And I am affected.
From the shades of lemon yellow to the emerald greens and deep-sea blues, the image speaks to me.
A young mother, holding her child as her little girl points at the sky.
The girl is laughing, smiling. The mother looks so proud and grateful. They’re happy. The mother’s face is full of hope.
It’s a simple image, and it rips my heart wide open.
Make something ugly beautiful.
As I stare at our creation, a sob works its way up my throat and out through my parted lips, surprising me with its strength. I press my hand to my mouth, a little embarrassed, as I gulp.
Jesse tilts his head and moves in closer, curling a hand over my shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Totally,” I say softly. He brushes a finger against my cheek as another wave of emotion hits me. “I don’t know why I’m getting so choked up. I guess it just ... It turned out even better than I hoped it would.”
The weight of his hand on my shoulder warms me. “It’s perfect. Exactly what this place was missing,” he says.
I swallow, the lump in my throat making it hard. But sometimes the hard things are the best things.
The thought brings me back to the list.
To Claire.
It’s one of our oldest inside jokes.
“It’s so easy to feel the hard thing, but so hard to say it.” She would sigh, collapsing on my parents’ couch after a date with her latest crush back in high school. “Why is that, Ruby? Why is it soooo hard?”
“Because it is the hard thing,” I would say in my wise-old-sage-from-a-fantasy-film voice. “And the hard thing is hard.”
And then we’d laugh and deconstruct every second of her evening, from the hand-holding to the making out to the post-drop-off text. I had so much fun swooning vicariously through Claire that it took years for me to realize that I’d never said the hard thing.
I still haven’t said it.
I don’t think I’ve ever even felt it.
But now, staring up at this piece and the gorgeous man who helped me bring it to life, I’m feeling things, all right.
Hard things.
Beautiful, hard things that I don’t want to keep inside.
“This morning,” I say, my voice thick with emotion, “I was out with my mom. She invited me to join her at Cocoa is Love.”
“Ah, your church,” he says.
I smile. “Basically. I was helping her with samples for a new recipe and it just felt so . . . good, you know? Felt good to be there for her, even in a small way. She and Dad helped me so much the past two years—looking out for me, getting my groceries, walking me to physical therapy. Not to mention paying my rent when I was still too broken to work. And whenever I was sad or depressed or just needed a hug, Mom was always there, even when I made it hard.” I take a deep breath. “I wasn’t always a model patient. Sometimes I just wanted to quit . . . everything.”
His fingers curl a little deeper into my shoulder muscle. “You never told me that.”
I press my lips together, glancing down at the dusty, cigarette-butt-littered floorboards. “There was one morning . . . it was just Mom and me. I’d cried my eyes out and told her how empty I felt. How empty everything felt. How lost I was. And she just listened. Listened and said that we all feel lost sometimes, but that she would always be there to help me find my way home.”
I draw a shaky breath, gazing at the mural again, then at this man by my side. “I obviously don’t know what it’s like to be homeless. I don’t know what it’s like to be scared or cold or hungry, or to not have a place to go. But I know how grateful I am that I had family and friends to help me, comfort me.” I sniff and push a few frizzy strands of hair from my forehead. “I hope this gives Norman and the other people who stay here some comfort too. Maybe it’ll remind them that there’s still hope out there . . . still a reason to believe that things can get better.”
