She had always preferred pens to pencils.  She wasn't entirely sure why.  Pencils were definitely a lot easier. Add a little more pressure, and the lead would give.  Apply less, and the lines would soften.  And then there was the matter of mistakes.  A pencil was very forgiving, as long as an art-gum eraser was nearby.  A pen, on the other hand, left permanent marks.  They could not be removed and all mistakes were forces to be reckoned with.  They served as a reminder of what went wrong. You had to work with them.  Incorporate them into the final drawing.  Build on them.  Draw over them.  Regardless of what you did to them, they could not be ignored. 

Maybe that was just it.  Maybe she preferred the challenge of a pen.  Or perhaps it was the way it felt gliding over the page.  Or it could be the contrast of the black ink on a stark white background.  Or maybe it was simply because a pen was always handy and she had just gotten used to it. 

She thought about this as she pulled out an old familiar drawing.  It was one that she began working on almost nine years ago.  The drawing had started out great.  She smiled as she reminisced about its beginning, and how excited and enthusiastic she was as she first pushed her stylus around on this particular piece of drawing paper.  She remembered the stark contrast of the fresh strokes on the fresh surface.   Everything was so new and the possibilities seemed endless and exciting.  This drawing could have gone anywhere.  The lines could have taken her anywhere.  And she had visions of where they were going to lead and that thrilled her as she pushed onward. 

But recently things had changed.  Someone had drawn a thick, dense line over all her efforts.  A line so strong and bold that no matter what she did, she couldn't hide it.  She couldn't make it work and at first she was angry at him.  He ruined it.  He ruined everything.  Nine years she had spent trying to make this drawing work.  And in one moment, nine years of work had been altered beyond repair.

This evening, she took a step back as she focused on her drawing.   Slowly her eyes widened at what she saw.  She hadn’t really noticed it before.  Perhaps she had been too close to the canvas to ever really see it.  The edges of her paper had become dingy and were starting to warp and curl inward.  She let out a stifled nervous laugh when she thought about those worn edges enclosing in on her face.  But it wasn’t the paper she was worried about.  No, what she noticed was that she no longer recognized the face that was in front of her.  The layers upon layers of lines made circles around her eyes and the cross-hatching along her lips no longer resembled the smile that she had so excitedly began with.  The years upon years of work spent on this portraiture had turned a face that was bright and clear and hopeful into one that was dark and drab and dismayed.

Before the tears welled up in her eyes and distorted her vision, she shifted her focus and began contemplating that line that changed everything.  The line by itself was beautiful.  Simple.  But very beautiful.  It moved in soft waves that were drawn along the edge of her face and hugged the curves of her jaw line.  As she followed the form with her eyes from top to bottom, her left hand unconsciously mimicked the line across her cheek.  It gave her a light chill down her spine.  Never had one move evoked such a response from her. 

It was then that it became clear that it was not the mark of a man who was careless and un-thoughtful that had effortlessly ruined her drawing.   It was years of denial and hard labor in an effort to force something to work that was never working to begin with that did her in.  And the truth was, it was her own hand that had guided those lines. 

With the back of her wrist, she wiped away the overflowing pool of tears that were building up below her eyes, causing new streams to run down her cheek.  In an effort to make things right, she had lost focus and lost the essence of what she started with.  She was no longer angry at him.  She shook her head as she realized that he wasn’t trying to destroy her.  He was trying to help her. 

Still moved by how something so bold and yet so simple could mean so much, she decided to do something that for her was the bravest move she could bear to do at that moment.  Something she perhaps should have done three years ago, if not earlier.  She retired her old self-portrait, pulled out a new blank piece of paper and decided to start fresh.