NEW FEELINGS

Chapter1

The first thing matilda noticed when she looked at was your face. The structure of the face gave definition into your personality. She cataloged these thing without meaning to, her eyes just did it without her permission, but it was not liked she hated it. it was the highlight of her day, the way she could just recognized certain features like the certain people collarbone caught the light and eyes could turn a different shape of brown when sunlight reflected into it.

On the bus, going back home , her sketchbook in her lap, fingers pressed flat against its cover as if to contain the images already blooming in her mind. she watched the woman just across her as, her was back in a loose burn and her head tilted back with the afternoon sun making her skin glow. there was a small mole just below her left eye. Matilda imagined drawing her and being able to express her story. She saw so much potential in what a masterpiece could be made. She always filled her sketchbook with women like this. Women with stories that could be turned into beautiful masterpiece.

At sixteen, Matilda had been drawing for so long, but now her drawing dynamic had began to narrow.Landscaspe felt like background, never really interesting. What she needed was the body. The female body. The wonderful structure of the hip, The thickness of the tight, the infinite variation of the breast. Her sketchbook filled with women sleeping, women with their limbs tangled in sheets, their faces turned away and bodies in painstaking detailed that would make her question her sanity.

She told herself it was artistic study and the female body was just her current subject of attention. She wa just learning and observing. At school she looked at Lily Johnson with her pencil hand twitching.Lily always sat on the third row, which was two rows infront of her. She always noticed when lily would lean forward exposing her collarbone. she always imagined drawing the curved of her back but tried distracting herself.

" You're doing it again" said Emile, sliding into the seat besides me at lunch. Emile was one of the close friends she her nad could always tell matilda emotions.

" Doing what"

" looking at someone like you are mentally undressing them"

" I don't do that" matilda said as a pink blush formed on her face.

"chill" Emile said while biting into her apple with a delicious crunch. " am just saying not judging. You just got that artistic look. like you are figuring out how to capture someone's soul through their body."

The worse part was how accurate emile was and matilda knew it. She knew that she was mainly attracted to girls, cause not once had a boy caused such a reaction in her. She had even tried to draw male model from magazine but no of such ever brought her as much fascination with the planes of their chest, the lines of their jaws. Her pencil always stayed still, just like her heart.

But whenever she viewed a girl: with the rise in her chest, the longness of their neck, strong hands, her pencil would move like it had a mind of its own. The female body brought her so much thrill to draw and it became increasing difficult to resist the urge.

That night alone in her room, Matilda sat legs spread on her bed with a fresh sheet of paper. Her table was a mess of tubes of paint, brushes stuffed with dried acrylic, with charcoal stubs and kneaded erasers. Her wall were filled with collage of reprpductions of women reading, elongated nudes, drawings that made her stomach tighten every time she looked at it.

She never really understood what she was drawing, her hands usually moved liked it had a mind of its own. And she really loved that fact. After thirty minutes, she finally understood what she had just finished drawing. It was a woman reclining with her back slightly arched and one hand thrown above her head. The perspective was from above, looking down along the length of her body, and matilda had drawn every shadow, every hollow, every subtle shift of her bone structure. The breast were soft and full in size, their weight suggested they fell to either sides of the rib cage. The stomach curved so perfectly. Everything was prefect but that woman lacked a face. Matilda never drew faces. It was the one thing a lot of her female drawings lacked. She always perfected her other thing, and as she looked down at her drawing, in her quiet room with the rain beginning to tap against the window, she felt her chest open like never before. She felt herself longing. It was pure and unmistakable. This was wanting to look and keep looking, wanting to touch with her eyes what she couldn't touch with her hands, wanting to understand something about herself that she had been carefully, meticulously not understanding for years.

She thought back to Lily back in the class. She thought of the woman on the bus. She thought of every sketchbook she'd fill, every anonymous woman she'd drawn with such obsessive care. The shift of recognition slowly forming in her mind of something that had always been undoubtedly there. Like the moment in a drawing when you stop to understand what each line means in the final piece.

Matilda looked at the woman on the paper, without a face and a name,but a body that Matilda had given to her. And for the first time she didn't look away. She didn't try to hide feelings that wear already there.

She reached for her charcoal. Softly, almost tenderly, she began to draw the face. She decided to complete her creation.