Draft

By Lexi Jones

It had been two weeks since he left this earth. Two weeks of weeping from family and friends, where all they could do was celebrate his life with wine and the comfort of being around one another. But now came the even heavier part of this period: organizing his belongings.

Polly hadn’t cried. She felt like the only one who hadn’t broken down, and she felt guilty for having such an emotionally distant reaction to her father’s death.

Her siblings had used it as an opportunity to opt out of sorting through his things, claiming Polly would be the most resilient one to take on the task. So, resilient or not, she gave in to their wishes, always seeming to give in to everything anyone asked of her.

She was the one who held things together. If she didn’t, who would?

She pushed open the door to her father’s study. The doors had always been heavy enough to be impossible to open as kids. They felt lighter now.

The room was full of archived documents and boxes of miscellaneous items. It looked like it was going to take forever to get everything sorted.

She opened cabinets, filed folders in alphabetical order into crates, and packed work-related paperwork into cases.

She had sorted through as much of the room as she could when a small wooden trunk appeared beneath a few throw blankets and some stray objects that didn’t belong.

Polly’s curiosity intensified as she stared down at it, until her hand moved on its own and opened it. Inside was a kids’ shoebox, layered with dust.

Her eyes narrowed with apprehension, as if a live animal might scurry out of the box. But to her surprise, all that was inside was a journal that had belonged to her around twenty years ago.

These pages were filled with passion, love, struggle, and tears, though it was hard for Polly to remember exactly why.

Taking a break from the draining task of cleaning out her father’s things suddenly felt necessary. The room was filled with overstimulating, nostalgic memories, packed tight with reminders of what she had lost.

She opened it slowly. The pages were delicate, though stiff from the glue and other materials she had used in it.

The first page was empty, but the second was filled top to bottom in handwriting that didn’t seem like hers. It looked performative, curated to reflect the personality she believed she had at the time.

The person behind the words seemed familiar. It was still the strong-minded, opinionated Polly she knew herself to be now, yet it whispered an underlying sense of malleability — most likely due to how young she still was.

“He’s an artist. A musician. Devoted to song, enslaved to words. Together, we dance on fantasies and build them into reality.”

Polly didn’t even know who this so obviously significant person was that she had written so strongly about. She kept reading more about this mysterious man’s “timely considerations” and “off-beat patterns,” until she finally landed on the name that at one point made her heart palpitate.

Lux.

The boyfriend she once thought would be her forever. The guy she now could barely even remember.

He had once been her everything. Now, he felt like nothing.

Polly was in her late thirties, married, with two incredible children. This desperate, romanticized love she had clung to decades ago felt so small, so insignificant now.

She read the name over and over again, attempting to feel at least a little bit of… nostalgia? Bitterness? Embarrassment?

But she felt nothing.

All she remembered was the amount of space he used to take up in her thoughts. How she had built her world around him.

As she continued reading about her lost love, descriptions of how he wreathed in “deep thoughts” and “genius lyrics” made it painfully clear what the reality had been.

She had constructed him.

Became obsessed with someone she thought she knew, someone she thought loved her too. In truth, he didn’t exist.

She reflected on the times he said so little, and how she had filled in the blanks.

The small things came back now. How he never texted first. How he rolled his eyes when she was upset.

She wasn’t in love with him. She was in love with the idea of him. The potential… not the person.

This revelation, though dated, tugged at Polly’s heartstrings a bit. But she kept flipping through the pages of the journal, discovering more about who she used to be.

In another excerpt, the words were written with conviction, like they held some kind of universal truth.

“Every lyric speaks my shadow’s name. Honed in my body’s mold, crafted with gleam and gold.”

Polly let out the smallest exhale. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.

The overly intense description of a song she had once clung to so deeply was convincing enough to make her pull out her phone and search for it.

It still existed. Of course.

When the first few notes played, a sense of familiarity washed over her. But that was all. No warmth. No ache. No rush of longing.

Just the slight sting of embarrassment for ever holding this half-written song on such a high pedestal.

It sounded like it had been written with predictability and strain, trying too hard to capture something it never quite reached.

“This song proves that it was real,” the next line in the journal read.

Polly reached around for a pen and jotted down beneath it:

“It wasn’t for us. It was for me. I needed to say something I couldn’t.”

The song felt like the embodiment of a shabby script, but she continued to treat her innocent self with love, care, and as much understanding as she was able to give.

As Polly flipped through later pages, she came across a printed picture of an abstract painting. It didn’t say who the artist was, or the name of the piece. Just a faded image with blue streaks in every shade, emphasized by crimson red hugging the border.

The words were harsh. Dissonant in comparison to her usual harmonious tone. She had criticized the obscurity and vagueness it displayed, claiming it made a mockery of the “real art” that held depth and meaning.

But Polly now translated the hostility of her past voice as frustration. The frustration of not understanding it. Of not being able to rationalize what it made her feel.

She had written about this one art piece for more pages than any other excerpt in the journal, and even now, Polly didn’t understand why it had such a hold on her.

She looked at the painting again, and she actually liked it. In contrast to what she used to think, she quite enjoyed it. She grazed her fingers along the edge, picking at the masking tape that held it to the page until a corner lifted.

Light from the room blared across the sheet. And it was almost like magic, like something meant to happen. Just as Polly was about to put the journal away for good, she saw what looked like handwriting on the back of the picture.

She peeled the photo off the page and flipped it over.

“Dad, you are every line of blue, and all that’s fiery red. I love you.”

An epiphany rose quietly inside her. She remembered clearly now. She had shown him the art, hoping for connection, depth, or approval. But he had called it messy. He had dismissed it, not understanding why it mattered to her.

So she looked at the image again. And this time, all she saw was him. The grayish blue restraint he had lived within. The red undercurrents of love he never quite learned how to express. The painting was not just about him. It was about them both.

Polly slid the photo back into the journal and took a few deep breaths, absorbing all of it. The memories, the disconnect, the strange echoes of someone who had always been there, even without saying much.

Her journal had once felt like a record of truth. But now she knew. It was a draft. It would always be a draft.

She picked up her pen, flipped to the last page, and wrote:

“The philosopher Roland Barthes said that once something is written, the author disappears. The meaning then belongs to whoever reads it. I see that now. This journal isn’t a record. It’s a mirror. Every time I read it, it shows me something new. That’s the thing about art. It doesn’t end when it’s finished. It keeps shifting with the person holding it.”

The author was gone, the meanings had changed, all while feeling her father’s absence and her own presence at once. She let the pages hold her, and finally allowed herself to cry.