72 colors.

The square tin of colored pencils, shed of its holiday wrappings, sat heavily in my hands. I peered at it reverently, but I wasn’t really seeing the tin. The countless combinations and possibilities were already parading in my vision.

I was whole again.

But let’s backtrack for a moment, because any logical person knows that “becoming whole again” entails the brother thought: some kind of loss. In my case, it was art—in the broadest sense of the word. As a child, art for me wasn’t only drawing (though that was my main activity), it was painting, beading, decoupage, knitting, and—I remember this clearly—collecting huge arrays of marbles and other small trinkets and sticking the lot of it in a giant Mason jar.

Of course, as I got older, I traded the beads and marbles for—more sophisticated, shall we say?—graphite sets, pastels, and all the other tools that every artist has in his trickbag. But the artistic zeal was still there, then.

Everybody has that one special thing that they have a knack for. What no one realizes is how easy that thing is to lose. Somewhere between childhood and where I stand today, I had lost my art, and didn’t even realize it. As if sleepwalking—in a trance—I put my charcoals at the bottom of my closet and forgot about them.

The funny thing is—there’s always something funny, isn’t there?—that I saw that bag every day when I opened the closet. I just didn’t ever exert the effort to take a peek in it once and awhile.

And then this year—my junior year—I woke up one day and realized something had gone missing.

I couldn’t put my finger on it for some time; after all, the reason I had subjugated my watercolors to the dusty graveyard of the closet floor was that I had no time for art in high school. The art program I’d gone to every Thursday during my Wydown years had ended; with it, I had buried my art under the mounds of equations and essays and conjugations.

Now, I felt something stir. (“Awakening” might be clichéd. I’ll say “rising from a dormant state.” That’s something school taught me, you see, so the years lost weren’t all in vain, were they?)

I will, of course, have to give school some credit. Some twist of fate ensured that I would have to be making some kind of art in some area of my studies. And with every sketch, I was enjoying myself more and more.

I dug into my closet sometime this autumn and found everything I’d buried (metaphorically and literally, of course. School also taught me that distinction during my sabbatical from art) in pretty much the same condition as I’d found it.

I bought a sketchpad and got to work.

It would be an overstatement to say that everything became brighter and that the sky opened up whilst angels began singing. But I had finally put to rest the dull nagging that had set up house in the back of my mind for the last few years. If happiness got a little more three-dimensional when I recovered my graphites, then that’s all it took to make a world of difference.

Something I hadn’t realized was missing was back. And there was—believe me—much rejoicing.

And so now, as I sat there by the fireplace with a tin of Prismacolors, I was speeding towards making up the years I’d lost.

I had feared that I wouldn’t have time for my drawings, sketches and doodles once I entered CHS, and so I had shut them out almost completely. Now, wiser and more aware, I was going to reset the balance. My schedule, yes, was as packed as always. But somehow, art didn’t seem to add any more weight to my burden; if anything, I guessed it would make the rest more bearable in rough times.

In any case, I wasn’t going to let it slip away again. And with that in mind, I began to draw.