'Six'

Think of what symmetry means to you, reduce it to a childhood memory, a painting perhaps, made from pouring paint over paper and folding it directly in the middle, pressing it hard before unfolding it again. I forget what it was that mine looked like, because it wasn't intended. What was it that I had learned? That art was beautiful and useless. I couldn't paint either, couldn't feed the colours into the spaces that I had made in pencil. It became cloudy, unpredictable, like real weather, overflowing into my plans, ruining it because the result was different from what I had in mind at the time.

I made the simplest rockets: a triangle over a rectangle. And monsters, always monsters threatening the world as we knew it came from a friend. Somewhere a city was being torn apart by our rockets and monsters. Papers tore from our enthusiasm for destruction. This had happened, that had happened. Nothing was resolved: the monster was unscathed, we had thrown everything at it--all our rockets and the kitchen sink. Why was this one so hairy?

Scenery was the hardest, I couldn't put things into their proper perspectives: it was always warped, laughable, it was strange that I had still tried. Colours had made it worse and I had envied the beautiful and effortless water paintings of friends. I wonder now if I had made any drawings of parks, would I have known what to put on paper since I was too young to explore our Lake Gardens then, did I base it solely on my imagination or was it stripped off something that I had seen somewhere, because I was a copier, a lover of children's book covers (although I had never used tracing paper).

I wish I had kept what I had made at that age, but now it's too late; what would I get if I could dissect all my art to their very atoms.