Perfect

Witness Isaac’s latest masterpiece.

It’s so hard, isn’t it, when what you see in your head isn’t what appears on the paper?

I remember so distinctly that feeling from childhood, that bottomless well of frustration that yawns open when the vision in your head doesn’t match what your five-year-old fingers can sketch out; when you can’t make your own drawing look like the one on the crayon package; when all you want in the world is blonde pigtails in ringlets like Cindy Brady’s but your mother has insisted on cutting your auburn hair short; when you bake cake after layer cake and whip up countless batches of icing in the food processor, but they are too sweet and never look like the ones on the Duncan Hines boxes look, all symmetrical and no crumbs. When you would make the perfect Laura Ingalls calico pioneer costume if only you or your mother knew how to sew and why don’t you? When the teenage you wants the same skin as the girl in the Noxzema ad, the hair and the bodies and the wardrobes and the lives of all those cheerleader girls in all those Seventeen magazines stacked meticulously on your shelf.

When the writer you searches for the precise metaphor, tries over and over to find an elegant way to get her character out of the car and into the house. When the parent you envisions a perfect evening together as a family, with Clue and hot chocolate.

And you keep trying, until the ink in the markers runs dry. And sometimes you learn to see differently and sometimes you capture exactly what it was you meant all along.