I found my old sketchbook today. The purple one with the water damage on the bottom left corner that I always told myself was a design choice. It was under a box of cables I haven't touched since I moved in here, which means it survived two apartments and approximately four existential crises without me noticing.

I held it for a long time before I opened it.

I don't know what I'm doing writing this down. I stream to three hundred people three nights a week and I still can't say anything out loud that matters. So. Journal. Sure. Hi.

Anyway.

Okay so I've been thinking about the sketchbook thing and I want to write something down before I talk myself out of it.

The earliest memory I have of drawing is this: I'm maybe six or seven, sitting on the floor of my dad's workshop. Not at a table. On the floor, between the legs of his workbench, where it smelled like sawdust and linseed oil and something else I still can't name — something warm and woody and old. Dad's workshop had this specific quality of light in the afternoon. Yellow. Patient. Like the light had nowhere to be.

He was making a cabinet for our neighbor, Mrs. Alcott. I remember him sanding the same panel over and over, testing it with the flat of his hand, sanding again. He didn't say anything for a long time. He just worked.

I was drawing on the back of a grocery receipt with a stubby pencil I'd found on the floor.

At some point he set down the sandpaper and looked over at me and said, "What's that one?"

I held it up. It was a horse, I think, though looking back it was probably more of a dog-horse hybrid situation. Very abstract. Very ambitious for someone whose legs didn't touch the floor.

He nodded. Put his hand back on the cabinet panel.

"Good," he said.

That was it. That was the whole conversation.

But I remember it like it was something. I remember it like he'd said more.

Third grade. Mrs. Patterson's class. The smell of those fat crayons they give you in elementary school — you know the ones, they have their own smell, waxy and almost sweet — and the feeling of sitting at a table with too-short legs that made everything seem slightly wrong.

There was a girl named Kelsey who would draw horses too but she always made them brown. Every single horse, brown. I remember thinking that was a tragedy. Horses could be any color. I'd made blue ones. Pink ones with purple hooves.

Kelsey told me mine didn't look real.

I wanted to say: I know. That's the point.

I didn't say that. I was eight. I think I just looked at my pink horse and felt something close to defensive, close to proud, close to — I don't know. Something I didn't have words for yet.

Anyway. Third grade.

Okay. Sera.

I've been putting off writing about Sera because once I start I have to stop at some point and I'm not sure I know how to do that gracefully.

Sarah Jenkins. She went by Sera. She told me on the first day of fourth grade that her name was Sera with an E because Sarah felt like someone's grandma, and I thought that was the coolest thing anyone had ever said.

We were put next to each other because of alphabetical seating — Jenkins, Cole, close enough. She had this sketchbook. Not a school one. Her own. It had a brown paper cover and she'd drawn all over it in silver pen.

She showed it to me on the third day.

No one had ever shown me a sketchbook like it was something precious before.

She just set it on my desk during reading time, when Mrs. Brewer wasn't looking, and pointed to a drawing she'd done of a fish that was also a bird somehow. Wings and scales. It was incredible. Not technically incredible — we were nine — but the idea of it. The wanting of it.

"I don't know what it is," she said. "I just wanted to see if it could exist."

I didn't have anything smart to say to that. I just looked at it for a long time.

After that we drew in the back of the classroom constantly. Every day. During everything. During math (sorry, Mr. K), during lunch, during the long dead hour after recess when nobody could concentrate. We built this whole world together — islands that moved, animals that were also weather systems, a city where everything was upside down and people had learned to live with it.

I don't think I've ever been that unselfconscious about making something, before or since.

She'd look at whatever I was drawing and say something like, "the left side feels lonely," and I knew exactly what she meant. Or I'd look at hers and say, "this one wants more green," and she'd nod like that was scientific fact. We had our own language for it and we'd built it in maybe three weeks.

I didn't know that was unusual. I thought that was just what friends did.

In fifth grade her family moved.

Not the dramatic kind of moving where you get a party and everyone cries and exchanges addresses on folded notebook paper. The abrupt kind. The kind where on a Friday she's there and on a Monday she's not and the teacher doesn't say much except "Sera has moved to a new school, let's wish her well" and then we're onto spelling.

I remember looking at her empty seat for a very long time.

I had her email address on a Post-it somewhere. I don't know if I ever sent anything. I think I wrote a draft once and deleted it because it felt stupid. Too much.

I still have the page she drew in my sketchbook. The fish-bird. She left it with me on purpose, I think.

Anyway.

Something small I want to remember:

Dad made me a drawing table when I was ten. Like, built it. Out of actual wood. He didn't tell me he was doing it — it just appeared in my room one Saturday while I was at my grandmother's. Adjustable angle, little ledge at the bottom so pencils wouldn't roll off.

When I came home and saw it I said, "Dad, you didn't have to —"

He shrugged. Said, "The lighting's better by the window. You should angle it that way."

Then he went back downstairs.

I remember standing in my room alone and feeling this very full feeling I didn't have a name for.

I still don't. But it was good.

Middle school is like a bruise that never quite heals, it just stops hurting when you press it, so you forget it's there until one day you press it again and go oh. oh there it is.

Not anything specific. Just the general texture of being twelve. The sense that everyone else had received a manual and you'd been skipped on the distribution list. The lunch table math. The way cruelty traveled in that building — fast, horizontal, like smoke under a door.

I ate lunch in the art room twice a week.

I don't say that like it's sad. It wasn't sad. Ms. Fiero, the art teacher, had this thing where she'd play jazz quietly and just let whoever was in there work. She didn't ask why you were there. She didn't make it into a thing. She'd just be at her own desk doing whatever teachers do when they're not teaching and occasionally she'd drift by and say something like, "the shadow under that chin could go darker," and then drift away again.

I loved that. The no-questions-of-it.

I got pretty good at reading rooms around then. Who was having a bad day. Who was about to say something mean. Who needed you to laugh first before they'd feel safe enough to laugh.

I didn't think of it as a skill. I thought everyone did it.

I want to write about Mr. Okafor.

Junior year. AP Studio Art. I had worked toward that class for two years. I remember the feeling of walking in on the first day like I had finally arrived somewhere I'd been traveling toward.

Mr. Okafor was good at the kind of teacher-warmth that kept you just close enough to keep trying. He was funny. He had opinions about everything. He could look at your work for thirty seconds and tell you what was wrong with it, which felt like a superpower.

For about two months, I felt like I was finally working the way I was supposed to work.

And then the portfolio review.

It was the week before we submitted work to the state competition. He went desk to desk and reviewed everyone's pieces out loud. I don't know why he did it that way. I have wondered since if he knew what he was doing or if he was just careless.

He got to my desk and looked at my portfolio for what felt like a long time.

Then he said —

and this is the part I keep having to decide whether to write down or not, because writing it down makes it real and not writing it down doesn't make it not-real, it just means I keep carrying it in my head where it's heavier —

He said, "Maren. You have an interesting way of seeing things."

And I started to say thank you.

He said, "But interesting isn't the same as disciplined. There are technical problems here that are going to hold you back. Your proportions are inconsistent. You're avoiding the work you find difficult and leaning on style as a substitute. I'm not sure this is ready."

The room went very quiet.

I don't know what I said. Something small. Something like "okay" or "I understand." One of those sounds you make when you need the person to stop talking.

He moved on to the next desk.

I remember very clearly that I didn't cry until I was in the bathroom three minutes later, which felt like a victory at the time. Now I think — I don't know what I think. That it was a kind of training, maybe. Learning to keep your face still while something is happening to you inside.

I didn't submit to the competition.

I told myself it was a practical decision. That I needed more time. That I'd do it next year.

I didn't do it next year.

I kept drawing, though. I want to say that. I kept drawing. Just quieter about it for a while. More private. Less interested in anyone's verdict.

I'm not sure if that was resilience or just stubbornness. Maybe both. Maybe they're the same thing in different lighting.

Anyway.

Something I think about sometimes:

The way my dad would sand a piece of wood until it was right even when it already looked right to me. I'd say, "Dad, it's smooth, I can feel it's smooth."

He'd say, "Smooth is different from right."

I didn't understand that until I was maybe twenty-two. Three passes from done on a drawing at midnight, going back in, knowing there's something wrong in the negative space and not being able to leave it alone.

Hi, Dad. Apparently I inherited that.

The year I was twenty-two. I want to write about it because I've been avoiding it and I'm tired of avoiding it.

I was working at a home goods store called something aggressively serene — Hearth & Co., I think, or possibly I've renamed it in my memory to be funnier. Doesn't matter. Beige shelves. Candles that all smelled like "autumn" which is not a smell. A uniform that made me feel like I was evaporating.

I was posting work online — Instagram, then TikTok, then eventually Twitch, just to try the format. Every night after closing I'd come home to my then-apartment (smaller than this one, somehow, like a room inside a room) and I'd sit at my drawing tablet and stream to an audience of, at various points, four people, seven people, zero people.

Zero people is its own experience. You're just — talking to the recording. To potential. To nothing.

I kept doing it.

I don't know why I kept doing it. That's not entirely true. I do know.

It's because I couldn't stop. Not in a tragic way. Just in the way that you can't stop being left-handed. The work was the thing that felt most like me and so I kept doing it even when no one was watching, because the alternative was not doing it, and that felt more like disappearing than streaming to zero people did.

I worked retail for eleven months. I got a blister on my right heel from the non-slip shoes that I had for about eight of those months. I ate a lot of rice and a lot of pasta with butter because it was the math that made sense. I called my dad once when it was very bad and he said, "You still drawing?" and I said yes and he said "Then it's not done yet" and I sat on my bathroom floor for a while after that just — sitting with that.

Not done yet.

The platform started to pick up around month nine. Slowly. Three hundred followers became six hundred became a thousand. Someone clipped me saying something dumb about the color wheel and it got shared around, and suddenly there were new people in chat every stream.

I remember the first stream where chat was moving fast enough that I couldn't read every message. I remember laughing at something someone said and they could see me laugh and it was — it was something.

Like being found in a place you'd mostly stopped expecting anyone to look.

But month eleven was still difficult. I want to be honest about that. The platform picking up didn't make the blister go away. Didn't make the beige shelves less beige. There was this very long period where the thing I loved was growing and my actual life was still the same and I had to hold both of those facts at once and not let one eat the other.

I quit Hearth & Co. on a Wednesday. My manager said, "Are you sure about this?" with that specific tone people use when they mean you're making a mistake but don't want to say it.

I said, "I think so."

I was not sure. I was approximately twenty-five percent sure. I did it anyway.

Smooth is different from right.

I've been sitting with the Sera thing again.

I looked her up a while ago. Found a LinkedIn, which felt almost funny — we were the back-of-the-classroom drawing girls, the fish-bird drawing girls, and now she's a project manager somewhere in Chicago or maybe Seattle.

I didn't reach out.

Not because I don't think about her. I think about her whenever I open a new sketchbook. That specific moment of showing someone something before you know if it's good, the moment when it's just yours and theirs and nobody else's yet.

I don't know how to say "you taught me what trust feels like inside the act of making something" to a LinkedIn profile.

Maybe I'll write it here instead.

Sera. The fish-bird lives in a box under my bed. I still think you were right that it could exist.

Okay. The thing I've been building toward without knowing I was building toward it.

Summer, the year I was fifteen. After junior year. After Mr. Okafor.

I was at my dad's workshop — I still went there sometimes, even as a teenager, even when it wasn't cool to want to hang out with your dad. It was just quiet in there. And quiet was something I needed that summer.

He was working on a rocking chair. Detail work on the joints. He had this focused look he got — everything slightly inward, like he was having a conversation with the wood that nobody else was invited to.

I was sitting on the workbench with my sketchbook, not really drawing. Just existing near him.

At some point I said, "Do you ever make something and it's not right but you can't figure out what's wrong with it?"

He didn't look up right away. Just kept working.

Then he said, "Always."

I said, "What do you do?"

He set down his tool. Picked it back up. Then he said — and I want to write this exactly right because I've been thinking about it for ten years —

"I get close enough to know where it's not right. And then I work from there. Not from where I wish it was. From where it actually is."

From where it actually is.

He said it like it was practical. Like it was just woodworking advice. And maybe it was.

But I was fifteen and bruised and carrying a portfolio I hadn't submitted and a space in fourth grade that was still just a little bit empty, and it landed somewhere bigger than woodworking.

From where it actually is.

I looked at my sketchbook. The drawing I'd been not-drawing. Started from there.

I think that might have been the beginning of something. I don't know what yet. But the beginning of something.

— M

SUMMARY: Maren's childhood is shaped most deeply by two forces — the quiet, action-based love of her father, which planted a stubborn, practical relationship to the work itself, and the early loss of Sera, who gave her the first taste of creative intimacy and then disappeared, seeding a belief that the people who fully see you don't tend to stay. Mr. Okafor's public dismissal didn't break her art but it drove it underground, making it private and self-directed and harder to wound — the first trace of someone who would learn, eventually, to feel everything and show only what she chose.

Streamed until 2 AM last night. Just me and like forty people watching me ink the moss on a coastal scene for a client who will probably hate it.

Chat was good though. Someone named PuffyCloudBoi kept asking if the rocks were sad rocks or just regular rocks, and I spent like twenty minutes explaining the difference. The difference being: all rocks are a little sad. This is the correct answer.

Anyway. The apartment smells like the jasmine plant that's actually thriving near the window, which is miraculous because I forget to water it constantly. The rest of them are fine. The pothos is basically immortal. The little succulent Julian left here is still alive and I keep almost throwing it away and then not.

Note to self: throw away the succulent.

I made rice for dinner and ate it standing at the counter watching the street. Nobody interesting. A guy walking a very old dog. The dog had that white-muzzle senior thing going on and I almost cried about it.

This is my life. I'm fine with my life.

I'm mostly fine with my life.

Dad texted me today.

His exact words: "Hope work is going well. Sent the check early this month. New router if you need one, yours might be slowing the streams."

That's it. That's the whole text.

I stared at it for a long time in the kitchen with my coffee going cold. He researches Twitch routers. He knows what bitrate means, probably. He sends the check early when he thinks I might be stressed. This is how I know he loves me — through preemptive logistics.

It's not nothing. I know it's not nothing.

I texted back: "Thanks, streams have been good. The jasmine is finally flowering."

And then I sat there for a second because I don't know why I told him about the jasmine. He can't see the jasmine. He doesn't know what jasmine looks like in my apartment, probably. He's been here twice.

He replied: "Good. Jasmine's hardy."

Sure, Dad. Jasmine's hardy.

I opened a new canvas and worked for three hours without stopping, which is the thing I do when I don't know what else to do with a feeling. Chat wasn't on. Just me and the tablet and a playlist of ambient rain sounds that I've listened to so many times I hear it in my sleep now.

The piece I made was actually really good. Dark greens and one harsh yellow. I don't know what it's about but I know it's about something.

So Sera Jenkins followed me on Instagram.

Sera Jenkins.

I didn't move for a second when the notification came up. Just — Sera Jenkins followed you and I was suddenly eleven years old in the back of a classroom watching someone pack their backpack for the last time. She didn't say goodbye, actually. Her family just moved. One Friday she was there and the following Monday she wasn't and nobody really explained it.

I followed her back because of course I did.

Her feed is all sunlit kitchens and a very cute dog and pictures of a city I don't recognize — somewhere flat, somewhere with a lot of sky. She looks exactly the same. She has her mom's cheekbones. She's smiling in most of the pictures in that way that's either genuinely happy or very practiced.

I've been both. I can't tell from photos.

She DM'd me within an hour. "Oh my god, Maren Cole. Are you still drawing??"

I looked at the message for a long time. Looked at it like it was a math problem. What does she want? What is the shape of this reaching-out?

And then I decided to just — be normal about it. I wrote back: "Yes lol. I stream it now. Are you the one with the very cute dog?"

She sent a voice memo of herself laughing. It sounded just like her. It sounded like someone I used to know very well and then lost in a way that never had clean edges.

We talked for two hours. She's in Boise. She teaches kindergarten. She asked if I remembered the sketchbook we used to share and I said yes and then I had to put my phone down for a second because.

Yeah. I remembered.

The sketchbook. We drew mermaids with teeth. She drew the tail halves and I drew the faces and we never once disagreed about who drew what.

Anyway.

Good stream night.

I was working on a piece for a zine — forest spirits, liminal, a lot of layered texture — and chat was genuinely engaged in a way that doesn't always happen. Sometimes streams feel like performing into a void with occasional donations. Tonight felt like a room.

Someone called NightJarSound said, "the way you layer the undergrowth is making me physically calm," and I laughed, and I said, "that's the goal, honestly, everything I make is just an attempt to create one calm feeling in a world with too many feelings."

And I meant it more than I expected to.

The donations were small but consistent. I ended on a piece I was actually proud of, which is rarer than it sounds — usually I'm too inside it to know if something's working. But tonight I could see it. The color story made sense. The figure in the lower left corner felt like she was genuinely pausing rather than just placed there.

After I signed off, I made tea and sat on my floor — my floor is good for this, I have a rug from a yard sale that's inexplicably comfortable — and I thought: I made a good thing tonight and people watched me make it and that was enough. That was actually enough.

I didn't spiral after. That's the new part. I just sat with the feeling without immediately waiting for it to be taken away.

That's the new part.

Sera and I have been talking almost every day now.

Mostly voice memos. She sends these long ones while she's walking her dog — I can hear the dog's tags jingling in the background, a nice steady percussion — and she talks about her life in this open, slightly overshared way that I find both endearing and useful.

Useful is a weird word for a friend. I know that.

She told me about a fight with her girlfriend, a woman named Priya who sounds warm and also slightly exhausting. Sera said, "I just feel like she never really asks about my day, you know? She talks AT me and I just sit there."

And I listened and I said the right things — "That sounds lonely, especially with someone you love" — and I meant them, I did, but I was also doing a thing I've been doing lately, which is listening to understand the shape of what someone needs.

Not to exploit it. Just — I'm better at people when I know what they're actually asking for under what they're saying.

She needs to feel seen. That's all. That's the whole thing with Sera.

And that's not manipulation, that's just — knowing someone. Right?

We talked for forty minutes about the mermaids with teeth. She remembered that I always drew the eyes too big. I told her that was intentional and she called me a liar with such fondness that I felt it in my chest, actually in my chest like a small warm pressure.

I didn't tell her that I still think about that sketchbook sometimes. I didn't need to. Some things you hold and they're still real.

I ran into Julian.

Of course I ran into Julian.

At the coffee place on Burnside, the one with the industrial lighting that makes everyone look like they're in a Nordic crime drama. He was with someone — tall, easy smile, wearing the kind of casual outfit that requires effort. They looked good together in a loose, unworried way.

Julian saw me first. I watched it happen — his face doing that sequence, recognition, hesitation, performance of casual.

"Hey," he said. "Maren. Hey."

"Hey," I said. My hands were steady. I noticed my hands were steady.

He introduced his friend. The friend was named Cai and had excellent handshake energy. I introduced myself as "Julian's ex, which is awkward, hi, I'm Maren."

Cai laughed. Julian laughed in that slightly pained way.

We talked for maybe four minutes. I asked about his illustration work — he's doing more editorial now, he said, less personal stuff — and I nodded and said "that makes sense for where the market is," which is both true and a very clean way of not saying anything about what I actually think about trading personal work for safe work.

I know what I was doing. I know.

He asked about my streams and I said they were going well, growing slow but real. He said, "That's very you."

I said, "Is it?"

And he looked at me for a second in a way that I couldn't fully read, which is unusual, and said, "Yeah. Careful. Incremental."

Careful. Incremental. Like that's an insult. Like staying is a character flaw.

His exact last words to me, nine months ago, were: "You're too much, Maren. I can't — it's like being underwater with you. Everything is so intense all the time."

Today I smiled at him like a person who is fine. I ordered my coffee. I left first.

I left first. That was new.

In the cab home I sat with the feeling and I let it be what it was without turning it into a story about what it meant about me. It meant: we were wrong for each other. It meant: he left. It meant: I am having coffee on a Tuesday and I am okay.

That's all it meant.

Mostly.

Ordinary day. Recording this because I don't record enough of the ordinary.

Woke up at 9. The light through the bedroom curtain was doing that Portland overcast thing where it's not dark but it's not bright either, just this even grey that's actually kind of beautiful if you grew up with it.

Watered most of the plants. Forgot the fern. Remembered this while writing just now. Will do it after.

Worked on a personal piece — no client, no brief — just an image I've had in my head for a while. Two figures at a table. One's drawing and one's watching. I don't know who they are yet. The watching figure is the interesting one. I worked on the watching figure for three hours and I think I know their face now but not their name.

Made pasta at noon. Ate it with the window open and listened to the street sounds. Someone was playing guitar two floors up, something I didn't recognize, something with a lot of open strings.

Responded to Sera's morning voice memo. She was at a farmer's market and very excited about a jam situation involving figs. I sent back: "Please describe the figs more. I need this."

Called my dad. He picked up on the second ring, which meant he'd been near his phone, which means he knew I might call. We talked for twelve minutes. He told me about a cabinet he's building for someone's kitchen — the grain in the wood, the particular challenge of the corner joints. I listened and asked questions and the conversation was what it always is, a little formal, a little parallel, but warm underneath in the way that lumber is warm, something about the material of it.

Before we hung up he said, "The jasmine's still going?"

I said, "Yeah, it's going."

He said, "Good."

Good.

I streamed from 9 PM to midnight. Chat was small but lovely. I finished the watching figure's face.

She looked a little like me. She looked a little like someone I haven't met yet.

I need to write this out before I decide how I feel about it.

Sera asked me, about a week ago, very gently, if I thought she was making a mistake staying with Priya. She framed it as a general question — "Do you think people can just — change their communication style fundamentally? Like as an adult?" — but I knew what she was actually asking.

I knew because I had been listening to her talk about Priya for two months. I knew the whole architecture of that relationship. I knew where the weight was.

And here's the thing. Here's the part I'm sitting with.

I could have just answered the surface question. Could have said sure, people can change, talk to a therapist, I believe in Priya.

But what I did was — I started asking her questions. Small ones. What was it like last Tuesday when Priya didn't ask about the rough day at school? What did Sera do with that? How did her body feel when she realized Priya wasn't going to ask?

I watched her work it out. I could hear in the voice memos the way she was moving toward something, something she'd already half-known.

She said, "Oh. Oh, I think I've been waiting for her to be someone she's not."

And I said, "Yeah. I think you have."

And it was true. It was genuinely true.

But I also knew — walking her there, question by question — that it was going to bring her closer to me. That a person who's realizing her relationship is slowly emptying is going to turn toward whoever helped her see it.

I didn't invent what she saw. The thing she saw was real.

But I knew what I was doing with the questions. I knew where they went.

I don't know what to do with that. The honesty was real. The care was real. The architecture of it was — something I built.

Anyway.

Okay, the failure entry, I guess. The one I actually don't want to write.

Sera flew to Portland for a long weekend. Her idea, which felt like a kind of miracle — she just said, "Can I come visit? I really want to see your life" — and I said yes too quickly, too warmly, and then spent a week curating what she would see.

Curating. God.

Clean apartment, obviously. Plants looking their best. I planned three things that would be low-pressure but would show her who I am in a certain light — a walk along the waterfront, this tiny ramen place I love, a night where I'd stream and she could watch from the couch like she was there for it.

It all worked. She loved the ramen. She cried a little watching the stream, said, "This is so you, Maren, I can't believe this is just — your life."

And then on the last night we had wine on my floor and she said, "Can I ask you something? Do you ever let people see the bad days?"

I felt it like a cold thing, that question.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I just mean — I've been watching you this whole weekend and you're wonderful but I feel like I can't see the edges. Like everything you show me is finished."

I laughed. I made a joke about my apartment being cleaner than usual.

She let it go. But she looked at me for just a second before she let it go, and what I saw in her face was something between I see you and I can't quite see you.

And the thing is — she was right. I had shown her a true version of me. But I'd shown her a selected version. I'd chosen the pieces.

The same way I always choose the pieces.

That's what Mr. Okafor did, in a way. Made me go underground with everything real, made me only show the finished thing. And I've been doing it since. Even now, even here, even with someone I've known since we drew mermaid teeth together.

She left Sunday. She texted from the airport: "I'm so glad I came. You're one of my favorite people."

I looked at that message for a long time.

You're one of my favorite people. Based on what you let her see, Maren. Based on what you let her see.

I watered the fern.

Dad came to visit. Two days. First time in eighteen months.

He fixed the bathroom faucet without asking. I came back from a coffee run and could hear him under the sink, just the sounds of tools and focused breathing. I stood in the doorway and watched him work and thought about how this is the purest version of him — totally absorbed, totally purposeful, making something work that wasn't working.

He emerged and said, "The washer was shot. Should have been done six months ago."

I said, "I know."

He looked around the apartment. He looked at the plants for a long time. He looked at the drawing tablet, my whole setup — the ring light, the second monitor, the tablet that's always on, always mid-something.

"You've made it comfortable," he said.

Not you've made it beautiful. Not you've made it yours. But — comfortable. Like comfort is a serious achievement. Which maybe it is.

That night I made dinner — nothing impressive, sheet pan vegetables and the good bread from the place on Morrison — and we ate at my little table and he told me about the router he'd picked out for me and what specs mattered. I let him talk. I asked follow-up questions.

And then I said, "Dad. Do you watch the streams?"

Long pause. He looked at his bread.

"Sometimes," he said. "The late ones. When you're working on something detailed."

Sometimes. The late ones.

I looked at the table. I said, "You never say anything in chat."

He said, "I don't know how to do the chat."

And something in my chest that had been braced for a long time — not all of it, not forever, but a small part — went a little soft.

He watches the streams. In the late ones. He just doesn't know how to say he's there.

He's always been doing that.

After he left I sat on my floor with the good rug and I thought: the person who learns to say I see you without being able to explain how, that person is my father, and I have been reading his love wrong for years, or maybe not wrong, just at the wrong resolution.

I texted him: "The faucet sounds completely different. Thank you."

He texted back, fourteen minutes later: "Good. Let me know if it drips."

I love you. That's what that means. I'm pretty sure that's what that means.

Something happened in the stream last night that I'm still turning over.

I was working on a commission — portrait-adjacent, a woman in a very particular shade of amber light — and someone in chat named WrenWrenWren said: "your art always looks like it's keeping a secret."

And I stopped drawing.

I stopped drawing.

I said, out loud, to the chat, to the forty-something people watching at 1 AM: "That's the most accurate thing anyone has said about my work, maybe ever."

And then, because it was 1 AM and I was tired and the jasmine was doing something lovely near the window and I had the particular loose feeling of being around people who can see you but can't touch you, I said:

"I think I make art that keeps secrets because I'm still figuring out how not to. Does that — is that too much to say? Sorry. Anyway."

Chat went quiet for about four seconds, which in Twitch time is an eternity.

And then it exploded. Not in a bad way. In the way where suddenly everyone's talking at once — no, not too much, keep going, same, same, same, people sharing their own half-finished thoughts about why they make things, why they stay up late making things, what it means to put something into the world that's true but not fully visible.

I drew for another hour and barely talked and the chat just — sat with me. We were all just sitting together at 1 AM in different rooms and something in that felt less like performing and more like just — being somewhere with someone.

I'm getting better at that. The being-with.

The piece I finished looks like a woman in amber light who is genuinely at rest. No secrets in the composition for once.

Just herself. Just lit.

Sera called me.

Actually called, voice, no warning, which she knows I hate and she does anyway because she's always been like that, she's always been the type to knock and assume the door will open.

She said, "I broke up with Priya."

I said, "Oh."

She said, "I think I've been thinking about it since July. Since you asked me those questions."

There it was.

I said, "How do you feel?"

She said, "Sad. And sure. Both at once." A pause. The dog's tags jingling. "You knew, didn't you? You knew when you were asking those questions."

I held very still. I said, "I knew what I was doing, yeah."

Another pause. Longer.

She said, "Are you going to tell me that was okay?"

I said, "No. It was — half okay. The thing you saw was real. The way I walked you there was — I was steering, a little."

"Why?"

"Because it's how I work with people. I find the real thing and I help them toward it, and I don't always announce that I'm helping."

That's the most honest I've been about this out loud.

She was quiet for a while and I let her be quiet. And then she said, "The thing I saw was real, though."

"Yeah," I said. "It was."

"Then I think I'm okay with it. But I want you to just — talk to me sometimes, Maren. Like not about what I need. Just about what you need."

God.

I said, "I need the dog's name. For real this time."

She laughed. "Bernard."

"Bernard." I said it twice to feel it. "Of course it is."

We talked for an hour. I told her about the stream where I said something true and the chat sat with me. I told her about Dad watching the late streams without saying anything. I told her about the watching figure in the painting — the one whose name I still don't know.

She said, "Maybe the watching figure is you."

I said, "Maybe."

Maybe she's who I'm becoming. The one who watches and doesn't hide that she's watching. The one who knows exactly what she's doing with the questions and says so when asked.

I'm working on the painting again. Her face is clearer now.

Last entry for a while, I think. Not because things are bad. Because things are — okay? Actually okay?

Streamed last night. Small crowd. I was tired and I said so in the opening — "I'm running on fern water and ambition, everyone, welcome" — and the chat laughed and we started anyway.

I'm working on a series. Six pieces, six figures, all in different kinds of light. The watching figure is the third one. The first two are done and I printed them and they're up on my wall above the tablet and they look like something I made on purpose.

The succulent is still alive. I have stopped trying to throw it away. Some things survive against the expectations of everyone involved and that's fine, that's actually fine.

Dad texted Wednesday: "Looking at that router. Might come back in the fall. Could fix the window latch."

I texted: "The latch is broken?"

He said: "Has been since you moved in. You probably didn't notice."

I probably didn't notice.

Sera and I are talking about her coming back in November. I'm going to let her see a bad day this time. I'm going to leave one plant unwatered and one dish in the sink and I'm going to be genuinely tired if I'm genuinely tired and see what stays after that.

See what stays.

That's the whole experiment, I think. That's what this year has been — finding out what stays when you stop managing the distance so carefully.

The answer is still not fully in. But the jasmine is flowering again, and Bernard exists, and somewhere my dad is looking up router specs as a love language, and WrenWrenWren said my art keeps secrets, and at 1 AM on a Tuesday I told forty people on the internet something true.

And they stayed for another hour.

That's something. That's actually something.

SUMMARY: Over eight months, Maren navigates the return of Sera, an accidental encounter with Julian, and two days with her father — and in each, a pattern surfaces: she reads people precisely, shapes situations carefully, and reveals herself only in measured doses. The arc leans toward growth — she names what she's doing to Sera, she lets the stream crack open at 1 AM, she hears her father's love in a new frequency — but the Sera entries show the older habit still running underneath the new awareness, the steering that happens before the honesty arrives. She's becoming someone who feels everything and chooses what to do with it; she just hasn't fully decided yet to let being known feel as safe as being in control.

Dad texted at 7 AM, which means he was in the shop by 6, which means something's bothering him.

The text said: You eating enough?

That's it. That's the whole text. Three words and a question mark, which for David Cole is basically a sonnet.

I held my phone and looked at the plants for a minute before I answered.

I told him yeah, I made soup last week and it lasted four days. He said: Good. Then nothing for three hours and then: Saw your stream. The bird drawing. And I knew he'd watched the whole thing because I spent like forty minutes on the bird's wing detailing and he would have stayed for all of it, quiet in his garage with the volume low so my stepmom wouldn't ask questions.

He never says I watched your stream. He says I saw — like he just happened to pass by. Like my work is something he caught a glimpse of from a distance.

I used to let that specific thing hollow me out. The way he makes witnessing sound accidental.

But I texted back: That wing took me forever. Glad you saw it.

And he said: Worth it.

Something in my chest did a slow, settling thing.

That's his frequency. I've known this for a while. It's just that knowing it and actually hearing it as love are two different things, and lately — I don't know, lately I've been doing better at the second part. Anyway.

Streamed until 2 AM last night. Started with a commission piece, ended up pulling out this half-finished personal project — a series of hands. I've been sitting on it for months.

Chat noticed immediately. Kai typed:

"wait is this a new piece or is this the hands thing"

And I said out loud, which he can't hear, it's the hands thing, babe. Then in chat I typed: yeah, pulling it out. we're doing this.

He moderated like forty-seven people out of chat in the next hour and a half because I'd mentioned the hands project once, three months ago, in a 1 AM ramble, and he remembered. He always remembers. He keeps a doc somewhere — he's mentioned it, this running log of things I've said I want to do eventually.

I don't know how to hold that without it becoming something I use.

That's the honest version. The other version is that I genuinely like Kai. I like how he shows up. I like that he made a doc. I like that he thinks my half-spoken plans deserve to be written down.

Both things are true and the fact that I can feel both without needing one to cancel the other out — I think that's the work, actually. I think that's me, now.

After the stream I typed to him in mod chat: hey, thanks for holding the room tonight. it felt good in there.

He said: "always. the piece is going to be incredible btw."

I said: I know.

He sent a laughing emoji. I meant it, though.

Sera called while I was eating lunch standing over the sink, which is my most embarrassing habit, and I answered with my mouth full and she went "are you — are you eating standing up again" and I said mmhm and she sighed this long, affectionate sigh like I'm a stray cat she's committed to feeding.

We talked for an hour and a half. I sat down eventually.

She's having trouble with her roommate situation and she wanted to think out loud, which she told me upfront — "I don't need you to fix it, I just need you to let me talk at you." So I said okay and I did that. I made small sounds. I asked one question when there was a gap and she said "yes, exactly, THAT" and kept going.

At one point I noticed I was steering — building to say something that would reframe everything in a way that left me feeling useful and smart — and I caught it.

Sat on it.

Just let her finish.

When she was done she said, "Okay. I feel better. What's going on with you?"

And I said: Dad and I had a good text exchange this week, and the hands project is actually happening, and I think I'm fine. Actually fine, not performing fine.

She said: "That's different."

I said: yeah.

She said: "I like it."

We stayed on the phone another twenty minutes not really saying anything important and it was genuinely one of the better parts of my week. Anyway.

Someone in chat tonight mentioned Julian.

Not by name — they don't know his name — they said something like "do you ever think about the people who inspired the night pieces" and I knew exactly what they meant because the night pieces are the night pieces, everyone who follows me long enough knows that series is about something specific.

I said in chat: sometimes. but not the way I used to.

Which is true.

I thought about Julian for a second — really let myself — the way you poke a bruise to check if it's healed.

Mostly healed. There's a spot.

He told me I was too much and I believed him for a long time. Built an entire operating system around making sure I was never that again. Parceling out the warmth. Giving people just enough to feel seen and keeping the rest for myself.

I'm not sure I've totally dismantled that. I'm not sure I'm trying to. But the difference now is I know when I'm doing it. I can feel the moment I decide to give someone the curated version instead of the real one, and I can ask myself: why. Sometimes the answer is genuine self-protection. Sometimes it's just habit.

Julian taught me that. I'm not grateful to him, exactly. But I'm not angry anymore either, which is its own kind of graduation.

I finished the stream and made tea and sat with the hands drawing and didn't think about him again.

Kai asked me today — in mod chat, just the two of us — if I would ever do a collab stream. With another artist. He mentioned a few names, people in the illustration community, and I could tell he'd thought about this. He wasn't being casual. He'd made a little list.

I read it twice.

I told him I'd think about it. Then I asked which one he thought would actually fit the vibe of the stream, the late-night feeling of it, and he said one name immediately — this watercolorist in Seattle, Dani something — and he said "she talks about her work the way you do. like it's not for explaining, it's just for being near."

I sat with that.

I said: okay. that's a good reason. send me her link.

He sent it within thirty seconds, which means he had it open. Ready.

I spent an hour watching her old streams. He's right. She's right.

I haven't decided yet. But I liked that he pitched it like he was thinking about what would serve the work, not what would grow the numbers. I notice when people skip to the metrics. I notice when they don't.

Anyway. I'll probably reach out to Dani. Eventually.

Dad called. Actually called, not texted.

My first instinct was something's wrong. But he opened with "just checking in" in that wooden, careful way he has when he's made himself do a hard thing, and I knew he'd probably been thinking about calling for three days and finally just — did it.

We talked about the shop. He's making a dining table for someone's anniversary gift and he described the wood grain for about four minutes and I genuinely listened because I love the way he talks about wood. It's the only time he sounds completely sure of himself.

I told him the hands project was going well. He asked what it was about and I said: hands doing ordinary things. making coffee, holding a pencil, resting on a knee. the stuff we do while we're thinking about something else.

He was quiet for a second and then he said: "I think about your hands when you were little. You used to drag them through everything. Every texture."

I had to look out the window for a second.

I said: yeah. I still do that.

He said: "I know."

I don't know how to overstate how much that small sentence means. I know. Like he's been watching. Like all this time he's been keeping up with who I am and just not saying so out loud.

We hung up and I sat on the couch with the plants for a while and didn't draw anything. Just sat.

That's all.

Fought with Kai today. Not a big fight. But a thing.

He'd been — I don't know how to describe it — increasingly in the chat lately. More visible. Responding to people in a way that started to sound like he was the one with the relationship with them, not me. Answering questions about my process before I could. Telling new followers what I "usually" do, what I "always" say.

I felt it as a kind of crowding.

After the stream I typed: hey, can I say something weird?

He said: "always"

I said: I think you might be over-moderating lately. not the banning stuff — that's great. but the answering-for-me stuff. I want to answer my own questions.

A long pause.

He said: "oh"

Then: "i didn't realize i was doing that. I'm sorry."

I said: don't be sorry. I just wanted to say it before it became a thing where I resented you for something you didn't know about.

He said: "yeah. yeah, that makes sense. I'll pull back."

I said: not all the way. just — let me be the one talking, you know?

He said: "you're always the one talking. I'll remember that."

Something eased.

It didn't become a whole production. That's the thing I'm noticing more lately — I can say the actual thing, clearly, without turning it into a fight or disappearing before it becomes one. It just sits in the air for a minute and then it's dealt with.

I like that about myself. I didn't always.

Sera texted: okay I'm coming over. I have soup.

I said: when

She said: twenty minutes

She arrived in fifteen with two containers of miso from the place on Burnside and sat on my floor because she always says the couch is too soft, which — she's right, it's too soft, I bought it in a moment of self-care delusion and now we both suffer.

We ate and she talked about the roommate thing again, which is still ongoing, and at some point she looked at me and said:

"You're doing something with your face."

I said: what

She said: "You want to say something but you're deciding whether to."

Caught.

I said: okay. I think your roommate is trying, and I think you're measuring her against the version of her that already knows she messed up, which she doesn't fully know yet. She can't pass a test she doesn't know she's taking.

Sera looked at me.

I said: that came out more structured than I meant it.

She said: "No, it's — you're right. I hate when you're right."

I said: I'm not always right. I'm just sometimes right in a way that's annoying.

She laughed and stole the last of my soup and stayed until eleven watching something stupid on my laptop, her shoulder against my shoulder on the too-soft couch.

I noticed I was happy.

Just that. Just the noticing.

The hands project is almost done. Twelve pieces now.

I was looking at them all arranged on my wall — printed, pinned — and I caught myself trying to figure out which ones were about real moments. Which hand was whose.

There's one where the hands are holding a mug and the knuckles are a little rough and that's Dad, obviously. There's one with ink stains on the side of the palm that's me. There's one that's just a hand resting open, doing nothing, and I drew it after a dream and I don't want to think about whose it is.

Julian, probably. Or some composite of everyone who's held something and then let it go.

I don't know if I'm going to show the full project publicly yet. Kai asked last week, carefully, not pushing. He said "if and when you're ready, people will want to see it." I told him I knew. He didn't push.

That's why I like him, actually. Not the devotion. Not the doc he keeps. The not-pushing.

I keep thinking about what it means to show work you made for yourself. Mr. Okafor stood in front of my first real piece and said "technically competent, nothing behind it" and I took that so hard I put my sketchbooks in a box for two years. I was fifteen. I had everything behind it and I just hadn't learned how to make it visible yet.

I don't think about him often. When I do it's more like a weather system I passed through than something that still has a hold.

The work survived. That's the whole story.

Late stream tonight, went past 2, chat was small and slow and perfect.

Someone asked me: "do you ever get lonely?"

Not in a sad way. Just — curious.

I thought about it for real before I answered.

I typed: yeah. but not in a way that scares me. more like a texture. like I know what it is when it shows up.

Someone else said: "that's actually really healthy"

And I said: I mean. maybe. or I'm just used to it.

Which is the truth. Both things. I've been alone enough to stop fighting it, and at some point the not-fighting it turns into something that looks like peace. I don't know if those are different.

Kai typed: "for what it's worth the chat's never empty when you're here"

I looked at that for a second. The chat's never empty when you're here.

I said: I know. that's not nothing.

And I meant it. The stream is a real place. These are real people. The intimacy is specific to 1 AM and a drawing tablet and plants in the background, but it counts. I'm not going to discount it because it happens through a screen.

I drew until 2:30 after the stream ended. Just for me.

Sera and I had an actual disagreement today. Bigger than the usual thing.

She said — and she said it gently, which almost made it worse — "I think sometimes you manage people instead of just being with them."

We were walking along the waterfront. I kept my eyes on the river.

I said: define manage.

She said: "Like, you always know what someone needs before they ask. And you give them exactly that. And it's — generous, genuinely, but it also means you never quite land somewhere unexpected. You always know where you're standing."

I wanted to argue. I had the argument ready.

I said: I don't think that's not caring.

She said: "I know. I don't think that either."

I said: but you're saying it has a cost.

She said: "I'm saying I sometimes wonder if you let yourself be surprised. By me. By anyone."

We walked for a while.

I said, finally: I think I know what you mean. I think I let myself be surprised and then I — catch up fast. So you don't see the surprised part, you just see the landing.

She said: "Yeah. That's exactly it."

I said: is that a problem?

She said: "Not for me. I just wanted to say it."

I believed her. That's the thing about Sera — she doesn't raise things because she's building a case. She raises them because she thought them and thought I'd want to know.

I said: okay. I'm glad you said it.

She said: "I know you are."

We got coffee after and talked about something else and it didn't linger in a bad way. It lingered in the way things do when someone's said something real and you're both just letting it exist.

Dad sent a photo today. No caption.

It was the dining table — the anniversary one. Finished. The grain is incredible, this warm brown that looks almost lit from inside, and the joinery on the corners is so clean it doesn't look like it has seams.

I looked at it for a long time.

I texted back: dad this is stunning.

He said: thought you'd like the grain.

I said: I want to draw this.

He said: it's yours if you want it

And I said: the drawing or the table — as a joke, obviously — and he said:

Either. Both.

Oh.

I don't know. Something about that landed differently than I expected. Like he's offering more space than I thought he had. Or maybe he had it all along and I kept measuring the room by older dimensions.

I'm going to draw the table. I might even send him the drawing. I think I'll send him the drawing.

Dani from Seattle messaged me.

Not because I reached out first — she reached out to me. Said she'd been watching my streams, that she liked the way I talked while I worked, "like thinking out loud but the thought has somewhere to go." She asked if I'd ever considered a collab.

I laughed in my empty apartment.

I told Kai in mod chat and he sent: "...did I manifest that"

I said: don't make it weird

He said: "I'm not making it weird it IS weird in a good way"

I replied to Dani. I said: I've actually been sitting on a version of this question. I'd love to figure out what it could look like.

She said: "Low stakes, no agenda. We just draw in the same room on the internet and see if it's any good."

I said: that's exactly the right energy.

She said: "I figured. Your stream feels like you'd only want it if it was actually fun."

She's right. I would only want it if it was actually fun. I like that she read that about me.

I don't know what the collab will be yet. But I'm looking forward to it, which is different from how I usually approach new people — I usually wait to see if looking forward to it is warranted. This time I'm just — already there.

Maybe that's Sera's point. Maybe I got surprised.

Late. Can't sleep. Plants are doing that thing where they're silhouettes and the streetlight makes the apartment look like a different hour than it is.

I've been thinking about what Sera said. About being surprised.

I think what she saw is real. I do move through things with a lot of information. I do know where I'm standing. I've spent a lot of years making sure of that, because at fifteen with Mr. Okafor, and later with Julian, standing somewhere unexpected meant standing somewhere that could hurt you.

But here's the thing I keep circling back to: I was surprised by Dad's text. Either. Both. I genuinely didn't see that coming.

I was surprised by Dani reaching out first.

I'm surprised every time Sera stays on the phone past the point where the conversation has technically ended and we're just breathing at each other.

Maybe the surprising is happening and I just absorb it quietly, the way my dad absorbs things, and then I hold it.

Maybe that's inherited. Maybe it's fine.

I think it's fine.

The hands project is done. Twelve pieces. I'm going to show them.

Kai doesn't know yet. Sera doesn't know. Dad definitely doesn't know.

But I've decided. Somewhere in the last ten minutes of sitting here with the plants in the streetlight, I decided.

I'm going to show the work.

Anyway.

Woke up at 9:47 and the first thing I did was water the pothos because it's been drooping like it has a hangover and I felt guilty.

The guilt about a plant. This is my life.

Made coffee. The good kind, the Ethiopian blend from the place on Burnside that I can't actually afford on a regular basis but justify by not having a gym membership or a car payment or, honestly, any expensive habits besides this one and the tablet subscription and the fact that I keep buying houseplants that I then have to feel guilty about.

Drew for three hours before noon. Just warm-ups, gesture stuff, nothing precious. I've been doing this thing lately where I don't name what I'm drawing before I draw it — I just let the line go and see what it wants to be. Today it wanted to be a woman standing in a doorway, coat half on, looking back at something that wasn't in the frame. I spent twenty minutes on the quality of light coming from behind her. The way light does that thing where it makes edges soft and specific at the same time.

I love that. I love when a drawing tells me something I didn't know I thought.

Ate leftover rice and an egg I fried badly. Didn't care. Put on a playlist I made in 2021 that I cycle back to when I'm feeling competent and domestic. Cleaned the drawing desk, which means I moved the clutter from one side to the other in a way that felt intentional.

No stream tonight. No obligations. Just me and the tablet and the plants and the light going gold around four and then gray around five.

This is a good day. I know what those feel like now, which I didn't always.

Stream night.

Set up at 7:30, which for me counts as early. Kai was already in chat when I went live, which he always is, little green dot appearing the second the stream initializes like he has an alert for it.

He does have an alert for it. He set it up himself and told me about it once, sort of sheepishly, and I told him that was very sweet and thanked him without making it a thing. Because it is sweet. And I know exactly what it means and I know exactly how to hold it.

The stream was good. I was working on a commission piece — a portrait for someone who wanted their grandmother rendered in this sort of golden maximalist style I've been developing, lots of botanical detail in the background, almost baroque. I talked through the color blocking while I did it. Chat was firing.

Someone asked why I do the background first and I said because I think about people the way I think about their context — you understand the figure better once you know what's surrounding them.

Chat went quiet for a second and then someone typed "that's actually kind of profound" and I laughed out loud, genuinely, and said, "don't tell anyone, I have a reputation for being frivolous."

Kai typed: you are the least frivolous person I've never met.

I read that aloud and said, "Kai, buddy, that is genuinely one of the nicest things anyone's said to me this week."

It was also true.

We went until 1:15. I was in the zone — the kind of focus that feels like it has a temperature, something warm and specific — and the chat just kind of sat with me in it. At some point it got down to maybe twelve people and the conversation got slow and real, people talking about their own creative blocks, and I listened and I responded and I meant it.

I always mean it. That's the thing people don't understand about me.

The meaning it and the strategy aren't separate.

Today I reorganized my color reference folders and I want you to know that I experienced genuine joy.

Genuine. Joy.

I've been using the same folder structure since I was twenty-two and it made sense then when I had forty files. Now I have several thousand and the system was held together by vibes and increasingly desperate subfolders called things like "blues BUT WARM" and "skin tones maybe???" with three question marks.

Spent four hours fixing it. Put on a true crime podcast I've heard before so I didn't have to actually listen. Made two more cups of coffee. At one point I stood up to stretch and knocked a succulent off the windowsill and caught it before it hit the ground and felt extremely athletic about this.

The folders are now beautiful. Hierarchical. Color-coded within the color coding, which I understand is a bit much.

I sent a photo of my screen to no one. Took it anyway. Sometimes I just want proof that I did something well, even if the audience is just me.

Actually. Especially if.

Dad texted around dinnertime.

"How's the drawing business."

No question mark. He types statements the way he says them — with a flatness that I spent years reading as indifference and now mostly read as just: his register. The frequency he operates on.

I texted back: "Drawing business is thriving. How's the sawdust business."

He sent back a thumbs up and then, three minutes later, a photo of a cabinet he's working on. Dovetail joints. The wood is this incredible pale ash.

I looked at it for a while. The precision of it. He is showing me something he's proud of, I thought, and this is what that looks like for him.

I sent back: "that's beautiful, dad."

He sent: "yeah it came out good."

That was the whole conversation. I made pasta and felt, for no reason I could fully explain, fine.

The commission is done.

Done done. Signed, exported, delivered, client cried a little (she texted me three crying emojis and a long paragraph about her grandmother), and I sat in my chair for a while just holding that.

I'm good at this. I know I'm good at it. Not in the way I used to know it — which was defensive, like a shield I had to keep shining — but just as a fact. I do this well. I've put in the time and the weird solitary hours and the period of being bad at it, which lasted longer than I wanted, and now I make things that make people cry in a good way.

Mr. Okafor's voice exists in my head less than it used to. Less. Not gone. But less.

Celebrated by ordering Thai food and watching three episodes of a show I've seen before because I wanted to know what was going to happen even while it was happening.

Slept nine hours. Perfect.

Kai asked me tonight if I ever get lonely.

This was at like 12:40, stream winding down, just him and four other people in chat, the kind of late where the conversation gets honest.

I finished the line I was drawing before I answered, which gave me about ten seconds.

"Yeah," I said. "Sometimes. It's kind of ambient, though. Like — not sharp, just present. Like a sound you stop hearing until someone asks about it."

He typed: that's a really good description of it.

I said, "I live alone and I talk to my plants and I draw for hours without speaking out loud and sometimes that's the best day I've ever had. Other times I eat dinner standing over the sink and I think, huh. Anyway."

Anyway. There it is.

Chat was quiet for a second.

Then someone — new account, never seen them before — typed: you make it feel less weird to be like that.

I didn't say anything for a moment. Just let that sit.

"Good," I said finally. "That's what we're here for."

And I meant that completely. All of it. The warmth was real. The calculation that keeps the warmth useful was also real. They coexist in me without conflict now, mostly.

Ended the stream at 1:05. Sat in the dark for a while after. The plants were silhouettes. The tablet screen glowed.

Good night, I thought, at the room, at no one.

I went outside today. Voluntarily. Without an errand as a pretext.

I know.

Walked to the park on Ladd and sat on a bench with a coffee and my sketchbook and drew people for two hours. Gesture stuff — catching the quality of movement before the person knows they've been caught. A kid running in a way that was all elbows and certainty. Two old men playing chess and arguing about something in a language I didn't know, but the gestures were universal, the gestures were I am right and you are wrong and I love you anyway.

This is my favorite kind of drawing. Nobody commissioned it. Nobody will see it. It's just me and what's true about the way bodies occupy space.

Got a little sunburned on one cheek, which is extremely on brand for someone who keeps forgetting she lives in a place that has a sun.

Stopped at the plant store on the way home — just to look, I told myself — and came home with a maidenhair fern that I know is going to be fussy and high-maintenance and I bought it anyway because it was beautiful and I apparently make decisions based on that.

Named her Margaux. She's already drooping slightly.

Welcome home, I told her. You'll be fine here if you're not dramatic about your moisture requirements.

She seems skeptical.

Stream night, and something funny happened.

I was working on a personal piece — this illustration I've been developing for weeks, a kind of dark fairy tale image, lots of thorns and a figure that might be sleeping or might be waiting — and I got into this whole extended conversation with chat about the symbolism of hands.

I said something like, "hands are doing a lot of work in this piece because they're the first place emotion goes — before the face knows what it's feeling, the hands already know."

And Kai typed: what are your hands doing right now?

Which made me snort-laugh, which I did on mic, which made chat spiral.

I held up my hands to the camera — the drawing hand with the callous on my index finger from the stylus, the other one with three rings I never take off — and I said, "currently they are conveying deep artistic commentary and also they need lotion."

Chat lost it. I lost it. We were laughing for probably two minutes about nothing, the way you do at 12:30 when everyone's a little tired and a little giddy and the original topic is completely gone.

Someone called me "Portland's premier hand philosopher."

I made it my stream title for the rest of the night.

I laughed until my eyes watered. Over nothing. Over everything. This is the part I don't know how to describe to people who haven't done it — the way a good stream night feels like the best kind of party, the one where nobody has an agenda and the conversation goes wherever it goes and at the end you're not tired, you're full.

Kai's last message before I ended stream: same time Thursday?

I said, "same time Thursday."

He said: 👍

That's all. That's enough.

Quiet day.

Drew in the morning. Ate well — actually cooked, a real thing with vegetables and a sauce I had to pay attention to. Listened to music while I did it, the kind of playlist that's too sad to be ambient but too beautiful to skip.

Around 4 PM I pulled up the folder of old sketchbooks I've scanned. This is something I do sometimes — not often, not when I'm feeling fragile, but on days when I'm solid enough to look at my own past without flinching.

There's work from when I was twenty, twenty-one, the period after the Mr. Okafor thing when I drew privately and obsessively and for no one. The drawings are technically rough and emotionally precise. I can see what I was doing — I was building a room no one could enter, and I was decorating it beautifully.

It worked. And it cost something. And it was probably necessary. And I'm not that person entirely anymore.

There's work from twenty-three, twenty-four, the Julian period. The work is more technically accomplished and emotionally — evasive? Like I was drawing around the things I meant. Negative space as a coping strategy.

And then there's the recent stuff. The grandmother portrait. The fairy tale piece. The park sketches from last week.

Technically better. Emotionally present. Both at once.

I don't say that to be proud of myself, exactly. I say it the way you'd observe the weather. Just: noting what's true.

Margaux the fern is still alive. This feels significant.

Dad called. Actual call, not a text.

He does this maybe once a month, at unpredictable intervals, and when my phone lights up with his name I always have a half-second of bracing before I answer.

Not because I dread it. Just because it requires a kind of attention I have to consciously prepare for. His calls are short and practical and love-adjacent in a way that demands translation.

"Your aunt Carol is asking if you're coming for Easter," he said, which was his way of asking if I was coming for Easter.

"Is that an invitation or a subpoena," I said.

He made a sound that was approximately a laugh.

We talked for eleven minutes. He told me about the cabinet — the ash one, a client picked it up, it looked good in their entryway. I told him about the commission, the grandmother portrait, the crying emojis.

He said, "so people pay you to make them cry."

I said, "essentially, yes."

"Huh," he said. And then: "that's something."

Coming from him, that's a standing ovation.

We said goodbye the way we always do — abrupt, a little awkward, fine. I put my phone down and sat with the warm-flat feeling that his calls leave.

He loves me in his frequency and I receive it in mine and something actually gets through.

That took a long time to learn.

Almost April. The rain is doing that Portland thing where it's not dramatic, just constant, just the permanent background condition of being alive here, and I find it deeply comfortable.

I am rain-coded. I knew this about myself.

Stream last night went late — almost 2 AM, which I try not to do on weeknights but the piece I was working on hit a moment of momentum and I didn't want to stop, and chat felt it too, that communal locked-in energy where everyone's just witnessing the thing happening.

The piece is the fairy tale one. It's nearly done. The figure's hands — the ones I've been agonizing over — finally look right. The way the fingers curl slightly inward, not quite holding anything, not quite reaching. Waiting and surrendering at the same time.

Kai was there for most of it. He doesn't say much on the nights when the work is serious. Just: present. A lit name in the sidebar. I've stopped thinking about what I do with that presence and started just — accepting it. The way you accept the rain.

Someone new in chat said, "do you always talk this much when you draw?" and I said, "only when people are there to talk to," which is the truth, and also maybe the most accurate thing I could say about myself in one sentence.

The drawing business, as my father calls it, is good.

The plants are mostly alive.

The coffee is excellent.

It's enough. It's actually more than enough and I know that now, which maybe is the whole thing.

Something I want to write down because otherwise I'll revise it in my memory until it's something else.

I was looking through the commission queue today — just organizing, not panicking, I want to note that I was not panicking — and I had this clear, quiet thought: I built this.

Not that anyone gave it to me. Not that I lucked into it. I made the work, I showed the work, I learned to talk about the work in a way that was genuinely me and also genuinely watchable, and people started paying attention, and some of them started paying money, and now I have a three-month queue and a Twitch community with regulars and a folder structure that is, frankly, a masterpiece.

I didn't always know how to hold that. The credit. I used to deflect it or undercut it because something about being seen succeeding felt more exposing than failing ever did.

But today I just let it be true.

I made this. I'm good at this. This is mine.

Then I went and stood in the kitchen and ate most of a sleeve of crackers over the sink like a goblin because I forgot to have a real lunch, so. You know. Balance.

Margaux is thriving. Fully thriving. New growth on three fronds. I feel like a parent.

She was just skeptical of her moisture requirements until they were met, I thought. I understand that completely.

Last stream before a week off. Told chat in advance, last week, so it wasn't a surprise.

Kai got quiet when I mentioned it in stream. Not dramatically — he just went to lurk mode, which for him means he's processing something. I noticed and I let it be.

End of the night, near 1 AM, he came back to chat and typed: have a good week. the fern better still be alive when you get back.

I laughed. "Margaux is currently my healthiest relationship," I said. "She'll be fine."

He sent a string of leaf emojis.

I said, "thank you for being here, Kai. Genuinely. All of you — " and I made a vague gesture at the screen, at the names in the sidebar, at the thing we'd built in this small ambient ongoing way — "this is a real thing. I want you to know I know that."

Chat went soft. People saying goodnight, see you in a week, safe travels even though I wasn't going anywhere.

I am not going anywhere. That's the joke that's also not a joke.

After I ended stream I sat in the quiet for a while. Just the rain and the plants and the glow of the tablet going dark on its sleep timer.

I thought about Julian for approximately thirty seconds — the way you poke a tooth that used to hurt, just checking — and found mostly just: nothing. The absence of pain where pain used to be. That's its own kind of information.

I'm not too much. Or I am, and it doesn't matter, because the people who stay understand the frequency.

Some of them stay.

I'm learning to let that be enough.

Week off. I'm going to draw things no one will see and overcaffeinate and talk to Margaux and maybe call my dad back. Maybe.

Anyway.

The client came back with revisions at 11 PM and I just. Sat there and looked at the email for a full minute before I opened it.

It wasn't even bad feedback. That's the part that gets me. It was just — "can we make the color palette feel more optimistic" — and something in me went oh, here we go, bracing for a fight that wasn't coming. I've been waiting for someone to tell me it's all wrong for so long that I read disaster into the neutral stuff now.

Okay. Optimistic. Fine.

I made some tea, I put on the long Grouper album, and I sat with the piece and actually looked at it. Not defensively. Just looked. And honestly? They weren't wrong. The blues I'd picked had this gorgeous melancholy to them that I was in love with personally, but the brief was for a children's wellness app, and I was basically giving their kids a Sufjan Stevens album cover.

I laughed a little at myself in the dark. A real one.

Swapped to a warmer palette. Sent it back at 12:30. Wrote "let me know what you think" instead of "hope this works" because I've been trying to stop building apologies into statements.

They responded at 9 AM the next morning with "THIS IS IT" in all caps. Three exclamation points. I stared at it and felt something simpler than I expected — just satisfaction, clean and uncomplicated.

I didn't stream that night. I just drew, and drank my tea, and the Grouper album played through twice. It was enough.

Bad day. Actually bad, not just the theatrical kind I sometimes perform for chat.

The Etsy shop had a payment processing error that I didn't catch for three days, which means everyone who tried to buy the October print set got declined and I had no idea. I found out because someone posted in my Discord like "hey just wondering if your shop is down" and I went to check and just — oh. oh no.

I fixed it in twenty minutes. But then I had to manually reach out to everyone who'd bounced, which meant combing through declined transactions and sending personal messages, and there were forty-three of them, and by message fifteen I was doing this thing where I was still typing fine but my jaw was totally clenched.

Kai caught it on stream the next day. He pinned a message in chat that said "maren you okay" and I was mid-sentence about my brush settings and I just stopped.

I said, "Yeah, just had a logistical nightmare this week, it's handled now."

He said in chat: "you look tired."

And I — appreciated that more than I said. I told him "I'm fine, dad" which got a good laugh from the room, and I meant it to deflect and I also meant it with actual warmth, and both of those things were true at once. I didn't feel like opening the whole mess up on stream. But I let his noticing land. I didn't bat it away entirely.

Anyway. Forty-three messages sent. About thirty of them came back and bought. Which is not nothing.

I stress-watered six plants that night. Two of them didn't need it. We'll see how that goes.

I've been thinking about the Hartwell commission thing and I'm still not totally settled.

Here's the situation: Hartwell is a mid-size tech company that reached out for a mural illustration — digital, big scale, for their office lobby. Good money. Like, genuinely good money, the kind that covers two months of anxiety about rent.

And then I looked them up properly.

They're not, like, evil. It's not a simple story. They've had some labor complaints — contract workers, not employees, which is apparently the loophole — and one of those complaints got messy and public about a year ago. The whole thing got settled. They donate to some good causes. Their interior design team is genuinely enthusiastic about the project and the woman I've been emailing with, Priya, is lovely and clearly actually cares about the piece.

None of that resolves anything.

I talked to no one about it for two days. Just turned it over. There's no version of this where I feel completely clean. If I take it, I'm lending my work to something complicated. If I don't, I'm performing a kind of purity I can't fully afford and don't know that I've actually earned — I've made work for plenty of things without looking this closely.

What made me decide was this: I asked myself what I was actually protecting.

If it was about the workers, declining this specific commission helps them exactly nothing. If it was about my reputation, that felt like vanity dressed up as ethics. If it was about not wanting to feel complicit — that's real, but it's also a feeling, not a position.

I took it. I'm charging full rate, not the "so grateful for the opportunity" rate I used to do. I'm going in with eyes open. Priya got an enthusiastic email and I meant it.

I might be rationalizing. I'm aware. I've decided to let that be part of the record and do the work well anyway.

Stream last night ran almost four hours. I only planned for two. This keeps happening.

We were working on the forest series piece — the one with the deer at the edge of the treeline, backlit — and I got into this flow around the 90-minute mark and just. Didn't want to stop. Chat was good. Kai was moderating and someone came in being annoying about my line weight and he handled it so smoothly I didn't even have to clock out of what I was doing.

I think I've been thinking about what makes the stream work, and it's not the technique stuff, even though I talk about that plenty. It's the 1 AM energy. The part where we're all a little tired and the performance layer gets thin and I'm just a person drawing and they're just people watching someone make something.

I said, semi to myself, semi to chat: "I wonder sometimes if this is the most honest version of me."

And then someone in chat — a lurker I've never seen talk — typed:

"it feels like it from here."

I didn't respond for a second. I just kept my pen moving and let it sit.

I said, "that's a nice thing to know," and moved on because it was 1 AM and I was tired and the deer needed finishing. But I'm writing it down here so I don't forget it. Someone who has no reason to tell me anything nice just — did.

I finished the piece. It's one of the better ones.

There was a moment today that I'm still thinking about.

I was at the coffee place on Burnside — the one I go to when I need to work somewhere that isn't my apartment — and I ran into this woman from my old illustration cohort. Deanna. We were friendly in school, not close.

She looked tired and she asked what I was up to and I gave her the real answer: "Stream three nights a week, commissions, the occasional licensing thing, it's working." And I watched something cross her face.

She said, "That's — yeah. I'm still trying to figure out if I can make the freelance thing work."

She's working at a marketing firm. She said "still" like she's been waiting for permission from something.

I felt that clearly.

I didn't perform encouragement at her. I asked what was actually in the way. We ended up talking for forty minutes. She's scared the work isn't good enough, which — her work is good. I told her that and I meant it and I was also watching the way she received it, which was with the specific deflection of someone who's heard it before from people who love them and can't quite let it past the filter.

So I said, "Okay, what would it take for you to believe that?"

She didn't have an answer. But she stopped deflecting.

I gave her my Discord. I don't know if she'll use it. But the conversation felt real, not performed, and I left it feeling like myself.

Julian texted.

It wasn't a big thing. "Hey, hope you're good" — the kind of text that asks for nothing and offers nothing and still somehow takes up space in your chest for the rest of the day.

I looked at it and I thought, what do I actually want to do here. Not what I should do. Not what seems stable or healed. What do I want.

I wanted to know why he was texting. That's the truth. I wanted to ask "why now" but I know how that reads and I know how that conversation goes.

I replied: "Yeah, doing well. You?"

He said: "Good! Moved to Chicago. Miss Portland sometimes."

And that was it. We did about four exchanges. It was genuinely fine. No teeth in it.

I sat with what I felt afterward, which was — nothing dramatic. A small warmth, a small reminder that he exists, and then the very clear sense that he's someone from before and I'm someone from now and those two people don't have unfinished business, they just occasionally remember each other.

I closed the app and opened my tablet and worked for two hours.

Some endings stay ended. I'm good at letting them.

Okay so the Hartwell thing.

They came back with internal notes from their "brand alignment" team — I didn't know there was a brand alignment team — and the notes want me to change the color of the central figure from the deep ochre I'd chosen to their corporate teal.

Their corporate. Teal.

I stared at the feedback document for a while.

Here's the thing: I have opinions about this, and the opinions are correct. The ochre is why the piece works. The teal will make it look like a mascot. But I also signed a contract that gives them revision requests, and this is technically a revision request.

I wrote a response. I revised it twice. The first draft had too much "I really feel strongly that" energy, which never works. The second was too flat, just technical, and lost the argument by failing to make it human. The third one I sent.

I explained why the ochre functions — not "I prefer it" but here is what the eye does when it lands on this color against this background, here is what gets lost. I offered two alternative warm neutrals that would compromise closer to their palette without destroying the thing. I included a mockup of the teal version so they could see it, which is a little bit ruthless and I know it.

Priya got back to me in an hour: "The teal mockup was... yeah. Let's go with your second alternative."

I felt very calm and very pleased. In that order.

I don't need to win loudly. I just need to win.

Rough stream. Not catastrophically, just — off.

The connection dropped twice, my pressure sensitivity was doing something weird, and I was working on a piece that I don't fully understand yet, which means I can't talk about it well, which means I went quiet in this way that I could feel chat noticing.

Kai put in the chat: "she's in the zone don't bother her" which was a kind lie.

I wasn't in the zone. I was frustrated and trying not to telegraph it because frustrated-at-the-work comes across as something it isn't.

Around the 90-minute mark I just stopped and said, "Okay honestly this piece is winning right now and I'm going to call it here."

Someone said "noooo keep going" and someone else said "honestly respect it" and Kai put a little heart in the chat.

I said goodnight, I closed stream, I sat in the quiet for a minute.

And then I went back and worked on the piece for another hour, alone, no camera.

That's the thing nobody sees. The stream isn't where all the real work happens. Sometimes the real work is after, when it's just me and the tablet and no one to perform competence for. Sometimes that's when I finally figure out what the piece is asking.

I think I know what it's asking now. We'll see on Saturday.

Dad texted to say he'd fixed the latch on my old bedroom window, which is — I haven't lived there in four years. He just. Fixed it.

I sat with that for a second.

He also said: "Hope the drawing business is going well. Let me know if you need anything."

The drawing business. I love him. I told him it was going well. I asked if he was eating okay and he sent back a photo of a genuinely alarming amount of soup he'd apparently made, with the caption "have a lot of soup now," and I laughed out loud in my apartment at 10 PM, alone.

It's a funny way to have a father. Short texts. Soup photos. Fixed latches on windows in houses I don't sleep in anymore.

But I've stopped translating it. I used to read his silences as distance, his practicality as indifference. I spent a long time doing that. Now I just let it be what it is — which is a person who loves me in a vocabulary I had to learn.

I sent back a heart emoji. He sent back a thumbs up.

That's us. It's fine. It's actually good.

I've got too many plants and a father who fixes things and a stream that cracks open at 1 AM, and most nights that feels like plenty.