Chapter 1
The Thing You Stopped Doing
There is a question I ask people when I meet them, and it works better than any other question I know.
Not what do you do. Not what are you working on. Just this: what did you used to make?
Almost everyone has an answer, and almost everyone gives it in the same way. A small laugh first, as though the question were slightly embarrassing. Then a pause. Then something surprisingly specific. I used to do pen and ink. I used to write songs on a borrowed guitar. I used to sew all my own clothes. I used to make those little clay animals, hundreds of them, my mother still has one.
And then, without fail, the sentence that follows: but that was years ago.
I have never once heard someone say I stopped because I decided to stop.
That is the strange part. Nobody quits. There is no meeting, no announcement, no last painting with the date written on the back. What happens instead is a slow silting up. A busy month. A move to a smaller flat where the table has to be a dining table again. A baby. A job with shifts. A comment from someone you loved, made lightly, that landed harder than they knew. The paints go into a box, the box goes onto the top shelf, and the top shelf is where years live.
