AN ARTIST RECIEVES HER HOPE

She could not stop checking her phone. Opening the banking app, she checked the balance again only to close it once more in disbelief. She repeated this little ritual over and over; every two minutes. Sighing deeply behind her cloth mask, “This world is so weird”, she thought.

Scortcha Evairy Grant had never really known her father. She thought she might sometimes remember bits and flashes of him and maybe even his voice. She wasn’t sure if it was really memories or what people had told her filling in the images. She had been told that he was a horrible, monster of a person. Many family members and friends who had known her, her brothers, and her mother before they finally got away from him, had confirmed, he had done horrible things; horrible things to her, to them, and to others. Her story was a terrible one. For some reason though, she always kept her eye on that silver lining.

She’d decided in her mid-to-late twenties that she had to let it all go. Drowning; it had taken her over a decade of addiction, abusive relationships, self-destructive behavior, sporadic homelessness, deep struggle and turmoil, and a few thankfully unsuccessful suicide attempts, to wade through the hardships she’d faced as a child and get her head above water. A few years back she had travelled out to the New Mexico desert with a group of good friends. It was a close-knit loving group of people all working on improving themselves, her tribe. They had camped out and sung songs by a campfire. She and a few others among them had lain under the stars and taken peyote while the rest of the group protectively stood watch over them. She had tripped till dawn.

It was that morning as the sun rose in beautiful desert caramel-golds and crimson-pinks, that she firmly decided she had better things to do with her life than drown in the pain of her past. It was only a couple of years later that her brothers had both died six weeks apart. Their deaths almost a year ago now had only further reinforced her deep need to choose to live for herself, not her old trauma. It was a difficult daily choice, especially now during a world-wide pandemic, but Scortcha felt lucky.

She’d had to return to Ohio repeatedly last year. It was a place she hated more than time and distance could heal. She was there again because of yet another funeral. This time everything was different though. It was because of Covid-19. Being back there was like screaming on the inside for forty-eight hours continuously, or thirty-six, or seventy-two, or however many hours one might find themselves trapped there. It wasn’t the place exactly, because some parts of it were historic and very pretty, it was the people from her past and definitely the memories.

Her brothers, one slightly younger and one a little older, had both gone the way of the bad choices that go along with an extremely bad childhood. Being raised in an overbearing, abusive, religious, psuedo-cult-like-environment had little-to-no perks. One brother passed from bad influences and a heroin overdose in a back alley in Toronto and six weeks later, the other brother was lost from yet another near fatal car accident, that this time, was fatal. “We all endured too much”, Scortcha thought.

“All three of us abused in all the worst ways, but as in all things man made, I, being the only girl, bore the brunt of it. I definitely thought I’d be dead at sixteen but here I AM STILL…and they are all gone; now she is too.” Scortcha enumerated to herself sadly. She looked down at her phone and checked the banking app. Seeing the ‘available funds’ line and inhaling quickly, she just as quickly closed the app again. “This world is so messed up!” she screamed in her head. She still could not believe it; sixty thousand dollars! She did not even realize her mother had that kind of money.

When she left at sixteen years old after questioning and clashing with the elders, God himself, and the whole shit-show, her mother had extraordinarily little, besides some invisible-guy-in-the-sky, to call her own. Her mother had quit talking to her. She had been expunged from the group. Scortcha had been alone. She spent the next ten years like that, wandering across the country, with little communication and no support from a place that had never really felt like home, and a people who only vaguely felt like family. The lawyer had explained to her that it was originally supposed to be twenty thousand dollars per child but, with her brothers both passing in the last year, it all went to her.

Again, Scortcha found herself waiting in the grubby bus station hub to catch her greyhound westward, back to the sanctuary of her small pueblo studio in the New Mexico wilderness. The place was very empty and the few people around all wore masks and had an aura of fear about them. She had been too exhausted to change the pre-booked mode of transportation back home to a flight now that she was financially able to. This experience had been vastly different than the two visits last year. She ached for home and her canvasses and paints and the comfort of her own bed. This had been a much longer trip and much more physically and emotionally exhausting than the previous two. Her mother was gone. Covid took her, not bad choices.

Scortcha felt a deep melancholy. She also strangely felt as if a weight had been lifted off her which she couldn’t fully understand yet. She had lost her childhood. She had lost her brothers. Now she lost her mother, again, this time wholly and completely because of a virus. She even lost her job she’d kept for three and a half years. It was the most stable she had ever been, and it was all gone now. The virus took that too. Yet, she somehow kept feeling hope.

It had started when she had been at her mother’s house to sell, store, or donate her belongings. To liquidate her estate; not that it had been much of an estate to speak of. The lawyer had come by the house to tell her about the will and the inheritance. She had to sign documents. He would take care of the sale of the house he told her. It was all too much. It was all too surreal.

When the lawyer finally left, she’d broken down into ugly, uncontrollable sobbing. She had already been grieving the loss of connection to her mother for over a decade. This was too much. Completely lost in the pain, loneliness, and uncertainty she was suddenly and deeply overwhelmed by, she thought she heard her mother calling to her through heartbreak and sobbing. She abruptly stopped crying. “I was wrong! It’s not about heaven or hell, or good or bad, or obedient. There is just love, and I love you! I’m sorry I didn’t see it before.”, was the message that she viscerally felt and heard, and then it was gone. Stunned but oddly comforted, she stopped crying. It was then she felt a chapter of her life was ending. She knew that she wasn’t alone, and she never had been despite what she’d been living through all these years. She sat a longtime staring at the night sky from her mother’s porch that evening.

When she woke in the morning, she felt within her whole being that a page was turning and the pen, now within her hand, was her own story to write. Scortcha had hope despite the loss all around her. She was on the cusp of something much more, a chapter she knew was hers alone to write. She knew and felt it deeply. She would choose herself because no one else would do it for her. She also knew now that she wasn’t alone. She had her people; her tribe, and she knew something was looking out for her; something old and weird and surreal.

Consciously and with effort, Scortcha put her phone down and fished a little black book out of her backpack. She had many such little books back at home all neatly tucked away with her other treasures. She’d been keeping them for years now. They were the records of her journeys, her art, of her pain, and where her pain had taken her. Her survival tomes. She thumbed through the pages of this book and saw rough drafts of her recently completed art works. She had always been artistic. One good thing the pandemic had brought, if that can even be said, was the time to fully focus on creating. She had planned, painted, and prosed her way through endless days of lockdown. Her ideas for art, sketches, poetry, short stories, her journaling and important dates to remember, all put down in her small, neat print in her little black books. Each bit always delineated by colorful clips or fancy dividers.

In the very back section of this book, she had begun writing a list of names and charitable organizations with monetary amounts recorded next to them. At the top of the list was an aunt who had been far more motherly than her own mother had ever been and a women’s shelter she was very familiar with. The aunt’s name had the largest amount listed next to it. The shelter was the one that had helped her establish herself and get her life to the good place it had recently become; after ending her last and final abusive relationship three years ago. She still volunteered there twice a month. Her birthday was in one month. She was going to be thirty years old. She realized she had never been this old or this hopeful. It made no sense, but she accepted it.

She heard the call for her bus and secured her mask and gathered her things. Before hiding the little black book away in her bag, she again glanced at the back pages. The long list of giving had a line with an ‘S’ marked next to it. She had included herself. Scortcha had decided she wasn’t going to tell anyone about the sum of money she’d come into. Her season of giving would be completely anonymous to all who would receive her gifts of gratitude. She wasn’t going to change much about her life either. She was already mostly happy and satisfied with it despite occasional lack and the state of turmoil in the world.

She knew that, historically, pandemics come and go and she was strong and resilient. She’d be educating herself about investing now and was grateful for the life skills-money management courses she’d already taken a few years back. She was going to take more classes of all kinds now. Sixty thousand dollars wouldn’t go far. Scortcha decided she was going to accept her friends offer to rent two spacious street-facing walls of her business office in the art district of Taos to display her art. She also now had the finances to create the website gallery she had been dreaming about since losing her real job at the beginning of the pandemic.

Next to ‘S’ on the line of the page the words, ART SUPPLIES, and the amount of one thousand dollars was recorded. She was investing in herself, choosing herself and her art now. She hugged her mother in her mind’s eye. She knew that it was her choices and her reactions to things that dictated her future from here on out. Scortcha had found her passion and her direction. She knew that even if the world ended around her, art is what makes it all worth living for. Her world had already ended many times before this pandemic. She was going to create her own world now.