E____ had said at the shower
that as a child
I had been quite the artist –
a fact that I never gave
myself much credit for
as it was a skill
I had long stopped crafting.
Remembering why I stopped,
I believe it was because
my common fear is and was
that I regress, or at least
get stuck
in everything.

You could see it
in the lines I drew,
they were Van Gogh like
sketch marks,
without the dazzling artistry,
brief, broken diagonal steps.
I couldn’t draw a straight
line,
for the life of me.
My pencil always
wavered with uncertainty
of the end point,
wavered with uncertainty
of committing to
narrow arrow progress.