a portrait made of echos

from the memoir I Told You So

7.10.2025

In an experimental drawing class, we were told to reconstruct a portrait from nothing but sound. I didn’t know it then, but the assignment would become a metaphor for everything I’d been trying to do with my life.

This is a fragment from my story; a glimpse into memory, art, and the ways we learn to survive by tracing what came before us.

A Portrait Made of Echos

School continued, like a surreal dream I couldn’t wake up from. That semester, I took an advanced drawing class led by a man named Grey Donellan, who insisted we call him by his first name, probably because “Professor Donellan” felt too hierarchical for someone who once hitchhiked to Burning Man.

He was the kind of teacher who felt permanently altered by a long history of psychedelic experimentation. Wild-eyed. Brilliant. Unsettling.

One day, early in the semester, he brought in a record and placed it gently on the player like it was a limited, signed edition. “This’ll set the tone,” he said. “It’s raw. Dark. But beautiful.”

The classroom filled with scratchy guitar and breathy, eerie vocals. It didn’t sound like anything I’d listened to before. Unpolished. Creepy. Almost haunted. A few minutes in, he casually revealed who it was: a man who had once been the leader of a cult. Whose name was forever tied to violence.

“There’s something honest about it,” Grey said. “People dismiss it because of who he became. But try to listen without judgment.”

Some students nodded. A few froze. Others slipped off their headphones and listened anyway. I just sat there, unsettled. I didn’t know what lesson he was trying to teach us, if any.

Is it about beauty and horror coexisting? About separating art from the artist? Or is he just testing how far he could push us?

That was Grey. Always dangling discomfort in front of us like bait. Always blurring the line between lesson and test. On the surface, the class was about drawing. But beneath it, something else was happening. Something stranger.

That was my introduction to him.

For the first official assignment, he told us to bring headphones.

“We’re conducting research,” he said, as if we were part of some grand artistic experiment.

The next day, each of us were assigned one square of a larger, unseen artwork. The twist? We’d be drawing it through sound. We were given recordings of students from a previous semester—just the sounds of them drawing. The scrape of charcoal on paper. The pressure of a graphite line. The shift of weight on a stool. We were supposed to listen and try to recreate what we imagined they had drawn, purely by interpreting the noise.

I thought it was ridiculous. Like art class had become a stupid, abstract riddle. And when we finished, what we created was a mess. Each square stood out like it had been drawn in an entirely different universe. The angles didn’t line up. The shading was inconsistent. Some parts looked rigid and dark, while others were curved and fluid.

You could see, in sharp relief, just how differently we had interpreted the sounds.

And yet, we had tried. Each of us, sitting alone with our headphones on, straining to make sense of something we couldn’t see. Interpreting noise. Guessing meaning. Filling in blanks.

Grey stood back and nodded at the strange, disjointed mural we’d created.

“It’s not supposed to match,” he said. “It’s supposed to reveal something.”

And maybe it did.

Maybe we’d created something truer than realism.

It felt like a metaphor for everything else going on at the time.

And it hit me.

This is what life felt like.

That’s what I had been doing all along.

Trying to recreate something whole from scraps and static.

Trying to build a full picture from limited information; what people said, what they meant, what they didn’t say,

what I was afraid they meant.

I’d been drawing my identity from the noise.

Reconstructing love from absence.

Interpreting silence as truth.

Listening for shape in the scratch of someone else’s charcoal.

And when the picture came together,

it didn’t look like the ideal.

It looked like chaos.

But not because we didn’t try.

We did.

We were just never given the whole image.

That was the first assignment.

The next project was slightly different, but the idea remained the same.

This time, along with the sounds, we were given an image as reference. The edges of each square had been started for us—just enough to serve as a guide. Our job was to recreate those edges and fill in the missing space in the middle.

The result was vastly different.

This time, what we created resembled art. An abstraction, yes, but you could see the hint of a staircase, the curve of fabric. The edges connected. The pieces fit. It felt more consistent, like we were speaking the same visual language.

We had morphed ourselves to draw as one.

Our personal styles faded out as we shared this mutual goal.

No one wanted to be the square that didn’t align.

So we softened our lines, adjusted our strokes, blended our instincts into something collective.

Something that made sense when seen from a distance.

Then Grey pulled up the original image, what we were supposed to be recreating.

It was a drawing of a woman descending a grand, ornate staircase in a flowing ball gown. The folds of her dress cascaded like water. Her face, in the original, was calm. Elegant. Effortless.

I don’t remember if it was a famous piece of art or just some photo he found online. It didn’t really matter.

All I knew was that our first version didn’t look anything like her.

And in the second experiment, there she was.

Like a shared hallucination.

A portrait made of echoes.

And that’s what I had been doing all my life.

In friendships. In relationships.

In classrooms and church pews and hallways.

I was smoothing my edges to fit.

Watching others for cues.

Studying the outlines left behind by people who came before me

and trying to recreate something that felt close enough to real.

Without a reference, I was chaos.

Lines that clashed. Shapes that didn’t make sense.

But give me an outline, and I could disappear into it.

I could blend.

I didn’t want to be the one square that ruined the picture.

The one that made everything fall apart.

So I adapted. I softened my lines.

I mirrored what others wanted to see.

I was always watching.

Studying the outlines left behind by people before me,

trying to fill them in.

Trying to reconstruct love from absence.

Draw meaning from static.

Interpret silence like a map.

In Grey’s class, we called it art.

But maybe it was just survival.

A desperate attempt to assemble meaning from fragments,

to turn scattered noise into something passable for a picture.

We weren’t creating art.

We were tracing ghosts.

And hoping no one noticed the difference.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

art is dumb.

my future is doomed.

thanks, grey.

thanks a lot.

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the cardinal room

6.27.2025

I didn’t know I was dreaming. Not at first.

The light was filtering through the curtains, and shadows flickered down the hallway like passing memories. That’s when I found it: a door I’d never seen before, wedged into the corner like a book that had fallen behind the headboard.

It wasn’t locked, but hidden.

Or maybe I just never looked hard enough.
A room lost to time, tucked away behind the visible world.

I placed my hand on the doorknob and slowly opened the door.

Inside, the walls were covered in yellowed map pages. Not framed, just pasted directly to the surface like layers of paper skin.

They overlapped like a tapestry of memory: ancient coastlines, city grids, topographic sketches, and foreign alphabets etched in fading ink.

A red line ran across them all, connecting everything.

A hand-drawn path.

There were no windows, but the room glowed faintly, as if I stepped inside a paper lantern.

Sky-blue curtains with watercolor clouds hung from the ceiling like a canopy.

Sewn into the fabric were dozens of red cardinals.

Each with painted eyes and rigid wings.

Some made of paper. Others plastic.

Fake. Unmoving.

Except one.

She was olive-colored. Trembling.

Tucked behind the folds of the curtain, she shifted—

her chest pulsing, stitched in place.

I reached out, heart pounding.

Her eye blinked.

Real.

Alive.

And trapped.

I understood instantly, without words:

this bird had been here a long time.

Camouflaged by fakes.

Surrounded by imitations so convincing that even she had begun to forget she was real.

But I had found her.

I had seen her.

I carefully untied the thread and rushed her outside.

Her eyes flickered.

Her wings fluttered.

And then—she lit back up.

Fully alive.

She looked at me, and for a breathless moment,

there was recognition.

I see you.

Then she flew out of my hands and disappeared into the trees.

I woke up with vision.

With clarity.

That bird, hidden away in a forgotten room, behind survival-mode distractions and dead routines—

that was me.

The part of me buried under “being normal.”

The part that called myself a failure just because my life didn’t go the way I thought it would.

But the walls inside that room had always been covered in maps.

Maps of who I’ve been.

Where I’ve gone.

Where I’m destined to go.

And the bird,

that small, bright fragment of soul I thought I’d lost—

was still in there.

Waiting for me to find her.

This dream didn’t just remind me who I am.

It saved me.

Because I finally understood:

the only time I feel free—

the only time I feel real—

is when I call myself an artist.

When I honor that truth.

Not as a hobby.

Not as a side note.

But as an identity. A lifeline.

This isn’t about recognition.

It’s about resurrection.

When I make art, I don’t just express myself.

I return to myself.

And every time I do,

I feel a little more alive.