“Jonny is leaving tomorrow for graduate school. We weren’t gonna make rent and it was already three weeks late,” Cady admitted, sheepish, blushing. “That’s why we were hosting Victory and the Beautiful. Only—they only have ten fans, and we didn’t feel right charging more than five bucks. Things were dire.”

“You’re our angel,” Jonny said.

The next morning, I ditched the sublet, in a shitty way, if I’m being honest—I think I left a note on a paper towel and taped it to the fridge—and moved into that loft on Dutch Street in the Fulton district of Lower Manhattan. Cady scored me a job, as a hostess at an upscale West Village restaurant, and Atticus cleared out a ten-by-fifteen-foot space in the living room. He was on one side, making sculptures, and Cady was on the other, painting, too, differently from me. Back in a world of artists—and away from Ben, away from Kate, away from dive bars—I started to make work again. The moment I picked up my palette knife, it was like whoever had been sitting on my chest suddenly stood up. I could breathe.

I work primarily in oil, which has enough variations in tone, hardness, depth, and clarity to rival most spoken languages. It can be thick and weirdly inconsistent like an unpasteurized soft cheese; deliciously smooth and stable like a room-temperature buttercream frosting; or thin and weepy like a salad dressing. It can whip into a knot, pan into the ideal smear, beat into a creamy, airless gel. Stiff enough for peaks and valleys—yet smooths out cleaner and flatter than hot glass. Oil paint is needy: It must be paid attention to as it cures in the atmosphere, slowly, and it’s hard to cheat. It lives in the world and follows a linear time of its own devising. Essentially: It is so much work that it makes everything else disappear.

The first time I used it, at a community arts class in the ninth grade, I dumped an entire, pudding-consistency cup of the palest teal, a half octave of opacity behind Tiffany blue, onto a ready-made canvas, then used a paper-thin metal knife to stretch it flat, into the flattest, densest rectangle, and then—the room around me fell away. I was hooked.