When I turn back around, I notice that the afternoon light flooding my room is creating shadows on my walls. The far wall has one of the whole window: sixteen slanted, golden squares. Something. Not nothing. I go sit across from it on the edge of my made-up bed.

Jagged shadows running through a few of the glowing squares make me look outside of my window at a small tree. Its branches are covered with tiny green buds on their way to being leaves. So many buds. I count the ones on a single twig. Twenty-one. On another one. Seventeen. And another one. Twenty-four.

Don’t ask me why, but it feels nice counting. Moving from one bud to the next with no thoughts in between. It’s making me feel more alive than I’ve felt all week. Until it brings me to thinking about Rex.

It’s not horrible to think about Rex. Even after what he did, so many memories of him still feel good. But some literally make me sick. Like that look of hate on his face at the championship game, and how he never even listened to what I had to say. How could he— Wait, why am I even thinking about this?

I grab my notebook and pencil off my desk and turn my attention back to the twigs outside the window. Make a mark for every green bud I count. Draw a leaf for every ten buds. A hundred buds and counting.

But then I start to wonder why the buds are taking so long to become full-grown leaves (it’s already mid-March). And that leads me to thinking that maybe the buds are a sign. That maybe I’m like the buds, growing slowly. But into what? I need to know.

But I don’t, so I go back to counting. Until all the buds begin to blur, and I feel like I should go outside and start tagging the twigs I’ve counted to keep track. But nobody’s doing all that. So I turn back to the glowing squares and think about how there are sixteen of them and sixteen years in me. How it could mean— No, not going down that road again.

I start sketching the squares instead—eyeing the correct angle of their slant, erasing and smudging to create the glow effect. I sketch and sketch, until the weight of trying to figure out what everything means and what I’ll do with my life falls away. Until there is only the pencil, the paper, and the image I’m bringing into being.