Redemption Looks Like

The smell of acrylic paint brings me back. It take me back to the dinning room table of the 3rd or maybe 4th house I lived in as a child. Takes me back to the simple wonder of mixing new colours. Of painting Christmas ornaments for all the relatives. 

My earliest memory of painting is of the time I sat on the kitchen floor with a stack of printer paper and my Crayola paints. Painting landscapes and starry sky’s, where the sky never met the horizon. 

I can remember this old notebook I had, it was fuzzy and had a crown on the cover. I was, for all intents and purposes, retaught the english language at 13 and 14 years old. I could not write at 5 years old but I would pretend. I would write page after page full of scribbles, trying to make it look like a story. 

I was a shy child, I would not speak unless spoken to often times. And as I once said my words never failed to fail me. But look at me now. 

This past Sunday I picked up a paint brush for the first time in a year. The first time in over a year where I really meant it. I painted for the first time in a very very long time. I painted only for me. Not a project, not a commission, not an attempt to make sense of my head. I painted simply because I wanted to, because I had saw something I wanted to capture. 

This is it. This is what redemption looks like. This is what redemption feels like. It feels like painting. It looks like taking all the words I worked so hard understand and using them without apology. 

Redemption looks like going back to my childhood delights and rediscovering them for what they are. They are the things I truly and purely love simply because they are. Redemption is the sweetest gift I’ve received today.