Day TwentyTwo-NaPoWriMo-The Things That Held Me

NaPoWriMo: write a poem about something you’ve done – whether it’s music lessons, or playing soccer, crocheting, or fishing, or learning how to change a tire – that gave you a similar kind of satisfaction, and perhaps still does.

Day TwentyTwo-NaPoWriMo-The Things That Held Me

From We're Islands Series - Deepa Gopal - Watercolour - Detail

I never “learned” to draw when I was young.
Never had paint on my hands,
Or glass-sleeved portfolios.
No towers of sketchbooks,
Just scattered A4 sheets—
Random, undocumented—
Because I never thought
That meant something.

I never had boxes of colored pencils
Or shelves lined with art supplies.
Only sturdy pencils,
A cheap box of watercolors.
I’d flip to the last page of Reader’s Digest,
And draw my heart away.

Still, colors called me.
The way blue stretched across the sky,
The way orange bled into red.
And I moved—
My body learning its own language
Through athletics and dance.
When words failed,
When life grew too heavy to speak aloud,
Music filled the gaps.

I wrote—
To organize,
To remember
Something I’d lost.
Because sometimes,
Words were the only place
That didn’t change.

Later,
I taught myself to paint.
One curious stroke at a time.
No rules,
No judges—
Just the quiet relief
Of watching something bloom
Beneath my brush.
Something I made.
Something I could hold
When everything else
Slipped away.

Art didn’t save me—
Not in the histrionic way—
But it stayed.
It sat with me.
In the mess.
In the storm.
Asked nothing.
Offered everything.

Now,
When the day pulls me apart,
I paint.
Or I write.
And it feels like dancing again—
On a page, in a palette—
A little girl
Finding her way back
To all the things
That held her
When nothing else could.

This poem needs reworking. But for now, here it is.