The Broken Bridge and the Dream

Messy Lines

Chapter 1

Large floor-to-ceiling windows cover two walls, and illuminate the room from sunrise to sunset. The room looked as though someone poured buckets of paint from every color into the room. Canvas tarps and paint cans cover the entire floor, and easels hold paintings containing different levels of completion. Each one completely different from the next, but still apparent that the same artist drew them. Sarah loved this room because it turned into the only room she shared with her Dad in her house. He would paint for hours while she would watch him and try to replicate what he did in her sketchbook, but she never overcame her fear enough to put her work on a canvas for everyone to see. This room became a safe space, a space that Sarah shared only with her Dad where no one, not even her mother, entered because she knew that it was a space that was not necessarily welcoming to others.

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Her father served as the bridge between Sarah and her mother, Clarissa, always easing the tension, never stroking the storm. Sarah and her mother argue about everything, from why they have no food in the house to what classes Sarah should take to succeed.

Finding Solace

Chapter 2

The day the arguing stopped, Sarah realized it felt better than silence. At least when they argued, it meant they still communicated in some way. The silence started when she got the call from her mother that her father had died in a car crash. Receiving that call made the bright colors she usually viewed life get covered in obsidian black paint. His death seemed like the tipping point of her mother's tolerance for everything he enjoyed before his death. Sarah could no longer draw or paint when her mother decided to be present at home because the sound of the pencil against the page and the smell of the paint reminded her that her husband had died.

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That seemed like the only time they interacted when Clarissa told her not to paint. After that, mom became Clarissa, and daughter became Sarah. Their relationship did not seem like a mother-daughter; they became two strangers that lived in the same house and once shared a commonality. When the bridge between two places falls apart, those two places do not share anything in common; they lack a reason to communicate and interact.

Flickering Light

Chapter 3

Doesn't anyone know when something becomes off limits it makes it even more irresistible? People want things they can not have, and Sarah wants to know what lies behind that door. She sits outside of the same bolted door every day when she comes home from school, every weekend when she does not have anything to do, and she even wakes up every morning before school.

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Sarah knows why Clarissa locked the door, but Sarah does not understand how Clarissa knew that her actions had an effect on Sarah and still proceeded to do it. Sarah begged her mom to see that she had already lost enough, that whether Clarissa liked it or not, Sarah had lost someone too, and that Clarissa did not have to suffer alone.
Sarah wants to paint, and thinks that when Clarissa locked that door, she also locked away the part of her that connects her to her Dad and painting. Without painting, Sarah feels lost and out of place, and she wishes that Clarissa knew that what she endured affected Sarah more than she realized. It affected her to the point where every painting she made looked as though it was the star in a black and white film from the 1900s.

Destruction of a
Tyrant

Chapter 4

Even after all of Sarah's attempts, that door remained bolted shut, but Clarissa had not taken away the arts at her school.

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Sarah found school to be the only place she felt safe because no one stopped her from doing what she loved, art. The teacher of one of the art classes expressed some concern over one of her pieces because of the message it seemed to send, so he contacted Clarissa and asked her to come to school to have a meeting to discuss further what the problems appeared to be.

Clarissa immediately told him that Sarah would be dropping the class and went to the administrator's office to let them know that Sarah would drop any art class she currently took and any she tried to sign up for in the future. When Clarissa came home later that day, she did not think anything of it until she got called downstairs.

Being naive, Sarah felt her mom finally wanted to spend time with her, but the delusion went away as soon as she saw Clarissa's face. She could not stop crying when Clarissa told her what she had done. Clarissa had once again isolated her and taken away her only remaining outlet, the only thing she looked forward to every day. First locking the door to the only room, Sarah felt safe in, then not allowing her to take art; Sarah did not think it could get any worse.

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Living or Surviving

Chapter 5

Sarah had to find a way to do art because she had driven herself mad. A couple of days ago, she saw a poster hanging up on the school bulletin board about this art program outside of school where she could teach little kids how to do art. She knew Clarissa would never allow it, so she lied and said she wanted to sign up for a robotics class. When Clarissa heard about this, she seemed thrilled that Sarah had finally demonstrated interest in something other than the arts. Sarah enrolled immediately and attended her first session that day.

She always came up with excuses to walk home so that her mother would not realize that she did not actually attend robotics, and it worked until one day, it started to rain. Clarissa insisted on picking Sarah up, so when she discovered that Sarah was not where she said she had been, she went crazy.

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The final straw. Clarissa was going to send her to Boarding School in Vermont. Sarah thought this might be a good thing at first, but after she looked into it, she realized that not only did it not have arts it only had math and science. Her schedule would be three hours of math, lunch, then three hours of science each day. She did not leave her room for three days after hearing this. She received a letter three days after that from the boarding school saying she got in.

The painting room had two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows. How could she not have thought about that sooner? She got a rock and threw it at one of the windows, and when it broke, she climbed in only to find nothing but a single letter, a letter that just said a few words, "To Sarah, From Dad," and underneath in small letters read, "if you ever are in a bind and need a bridge." She slowly opened the letter, and what she found inside happened to be all she needed to jump up and run to her mother.

Breaking Through
the Lines

Chapter 6

Sarah could not go to boarding school; she would not, so she spent days trying to come up with ideas. Finally, one particular day, she became so tired of her mother's yelling that she went outside to think. There she saw something that laid in plain sight the whole time.

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