Sitting at a café early one morning, I pulled out my watercolors and began painting the scooter across the street. The air was nice and the sun warm. A dog barked in the distance. An occasional car passed.
Midway through painting, the owner of the café brought me sunny-side-up eggs and toast and said, “Oh, you like to paint?”
“Yes,” I said, as she briefly looked at my sketchbook and smiled.
And I started to disclaim that the painting was not finished. That I’d screwed up the scooter’s contour and would fix it soon, but that I’d also made some artistic choices she should be aware of—for example, the bike was white in real life, but I was making it blue because I thought it would contrast with the background better—and that I’d really only started painting at the beginning of the pandemic (was that really six years ago already?), and that I’m really not a painter, I just have paints that I carry around in my backpack wherever I go, and that, oh, by the way, did she also know that I’m pathetic and no good at anything and that she should never get too close to me because she’ll just be disappointed in the end.
But before I could tell her all that, I looked up and she was gone, helping other customers.
P.S. This scooter sketch was painted as a postcard for someone in the Postcard Club. Each month, I send a small watercolor from wherever we happen to be. Learn more here. >>