if i could find you now
{things could get better}

we could leave this town and run forever
let your waves crash down
and take me away
.outfit.

--------------------------------------------

Pay attention, Dimitri! Keep your eyes up here, Mister Everhart! Those were two of the most common things that Dimitri had found himself hearing all throughout the day. It seemed to him that he could not keep his eyes on whatever it was his teachers were doing today simply because he found himself in one of those doodling kind of moods. The kind of a mood where your mind is tired and just wants to float up to the clouds leaving your body to look like nothing more than a tired empty shell. Thankfully his mind managed to stay intact with the rest of him as it was needed since his head was focusing on little scraps of paper and the tip of his pencil. Unfortunately, this was not good enough for his teachers. Especially the artsy teachers who were trying to teach you to draw something step by step and you were busy doodling away or going ahead. Maybe if the teachers started going a little faster then Dimitri would have to pay attention to keep up. But they didn’t so Dimitri decided just to smile to himself and inwardly blame the teachers for their own miseries when it came to trying to teach him. It wasn’t his fault that they were so painfully slow.

To Dimitri’s pleasure, it wasn’t long before he found himself free of any sharp tongues snapping out his name. He was free to roam the campus and maybe wander off a little ways, free to doodle all over the inside of his notebooks, and, best of all, free to let his mind drift all he wanted it to. Sweet, sweet freedom. Sure Dimitri liked this school and all but it was still work and it was still school. In other words, he was still going to end up day dreaming during the most horrid hours of school. Things such as lectures, reading, or watching some video that he could honestly care less about. But, honestly, what student did enjoy something like a lecture? Or maybe Dimitri was just odd. Really, he wasn’t so sure what it was any more. For now he would stick to assuming that any student who did enjoy lectures were simply strange since, in his mind, it made him less strange.

Now the dark haired young man found himself with a dilemma. He found himself with one of two choices at the moment. Dimitri could either go ahead and mosey around campus in his current attire, which consisted of a long sleeved, navy colored shirt and a pair of dark charcoal jeans held up by a dark belt, or he could go and change into something a bit cozier. Well, there was no doubt that a part of him was pulling to go up to the dorm and change so that he could just stay up there for the day but he also knew that he wasn’t quite ready to simply be stuck in the dorm. No, right now Dimitri wanted to have a chance to re-explore the campus all over again.

It almost seemed like he did this once a week. Once every week, Dimitri always seemed to find himself wandering over the campus and looking carefully at every building and every room to make sure he had every bit of it memorized. And every week, nothing ever changed but for some reason he was still just as eager to walk around as he had been the first time around. Maybe it was because he simply liked familiar things? Or maybe it could have been because he liked to move around? Whatever the reason was, Dimitri had no clue.

The Leonardo da Vinci Auditorium. Dimitri had been through it but not too much. He didn’t exactly spend a lot of time in it for school work or anything and had only stumbled through it on his walks like these. Most times he would open the door and a bunch of students practicing whatever it was they were practicing would all just stare back at him until he finally just closed the door and crept out. On a few other occasions he had seen artwork shown in here and came for that matter. Whether he would go in today, he wasn’t so sure. But, then again, the door handle was right there.

In the end, the boy had pushed open the door quietly and then carefully stepped inside. Surprisingly, nobody turned back to look at him and his ears were greeted by the sound of music. The sound instantly drew his eyes down toward the girl who was dancing. For a moment he merely stood next to the doorway watching her dance to the music. As he watched her he could already see the images in his head. Pieces of artwork that had yet to be created. Pretty, slender girls dancing in billowy dresses rather than something that looked like sleeping attire. Something more elegant than that. But then there was the opposite picture being drawn elsewhere. Something less pleasant and more down to earth. Quite the opposite of the heavenly picture on one side. This one was much rougher with the surroundings. Well, it would be. Both of these pictures would be different for everyone to see if they were put down on paper. Or molded out of a clump of clay or even chipped from some rock. As of now, they were only images dancing through his head.

With this sudden inspiration, Dimitri swiftly walked through an aisle of seats and then sank down in a chair as he dropped his backpack lightly in the seat next to him. His then pushed his feet up against the seat in front of him so that his ebony Puma shoes were in perfect view. The next step was reaching over and pulling his sketch book and a regular old pencil out of his backpack. To his great dismay, he had forgotten his wonderful graphite pencil back in the dorm somewhere thus leaving him with this little pencil that he had forgotten to return to a teacher. Then it began.

The first thing he did was nothing more than a simple quick line. A line of motion. A line that almost was what should have been the dancer’s spine. He then continued on by quickly sketching out little stick limbs connected by small circles to serve as hinges. Since he could not simply freeze what it was that she was doing, Dimitri made no time to add any sort of detail. Instead, he sketched out only a few different posses made up of nothing more than circles and lines.

When the young artist looked up again, he noticed that she had stopped moving around and had gone over for a break. Now he would add the detail. First the outline of a face, then a neck attached to some shoulders, and before you knew it a pair of arms were emerging. It was still sketchy lines rather then the smooth ones all of his teachers yearned for him to do. But sketching it made him much more comfortable. So what if he was confident in his first line? At least with a lighter one he could go back and fix it.

Instead of leaving the little flat form in the nude, Dimitri quickly placed some squiggly clothes on his dancer. It was only a simple dress though. Almost like a nightgown. She was still missing a face though. The other dancing girls to the right of her were missing all the big details while the one he was working on was just missing a face, some small adornments, smooth lines, and some shading. She was almost done and Dimitri was sure that he would leave the others blank.

Drawing the face usually would come naturally since that was just something he had always been able to do. He could always remember a face. But he hadn’t really caught this girl’s face. So he glanced up again only to find her staring back at him. There it was. The perfect face for his less than perfect piece of work. For a moment, he just stared right back. Then he gave her an amused grin and looked down at his paper. He flipped the page and tore out a fresh piece to sit over his drawing. Then he scribbled on it a quick few words. After the words were written, he steadily folded the paper into a little plane and drew his hand back to throw it in her direction. It did a few crooked little spins but thankfully landed near her feet. He then gave the girl another grin and sank back down in his seat to watch her.

His note read:

As she opened up his little paper airplane, Dimitri let his blue green stare fall away from her to look back down at the faceless girl on his paper. The small grin from earlier was still on his face as he sucked in his bottom lip thoughtfully. His right fingers then took hold of his pencil again and he lifted the lead to his dancing girl’s head. The tip of the lead barely pricked the paper as he let it touch almost directly in the middle. A small, slow motion to the left created a thin line. Then, carefully spaced from the beginning of the first line, he created a second line heading out toward the right. When his two simple lines were created, he saw the beginning of the girl’s brows. He made a few light lines on the face to make the spaces where eyes would be added as well as things such as lips and the nose. There were even spaces coming off the lines from the top of the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose. Unfortunately, he was stuck. So, to get himself out of being stuck, he looked back up toward the girl to get a glimpse of her own face. By the time he had moved his eyes upward, he realized that she was coming over his way.

Dimitri remained silent as he watched the girl come his way. He released his lip so that he could once again give her a full smile rather than one that was half gone because of his front teeth pulling on it. As she approached him, he found that his earlier compliment was in fact the truth. Her face was actually just as he said it was. Sure it wasn’t something that would just pop out to you in the middle of a crowd but that was what he seemed to like about it. It was so simple and had kind of an innocent, pure look to it. A clean look. Her eyes were nothing more than brown but they had some sort of enjoyable look to them. The happy kind of eyes. Or, at least, this was simply what Dimitri was seeing in her. Others could have thought the complete opposite of her. Personally, if he ever did meet anyone who thought otherwise, he would think them completely crazy.

“Alena? Heh, that’s my little sister’s name,” he commented as he looked up at her. He let his pencil rest on his on his stomach for the time being. Having himself slouched back really did come in handy when it came to keeping all of his little drawing things together. Not that his teachers really liked him slouching or doing little things like drawing sideways. But he still did it out of habit. Mostly when they weren’t looking, of course. “Alena Dahl, I’m Dimitri Everhart. Trey, if you want. Nice to meet you.”

After their introductions, Dimitri noticed her eyes looking elsewhere. More downward to be specific. So, naturally, Dimitri followed her gaze down toward his knees. He decided that she surely couldn’t be staring down at his knees so immediately assumed that it must have been the sketch book. The sketch book with the almost finished dancer and the rest of the skeletal poses. Suddenly, his eyes snapped back up toward her and he furrowed his brow with a half grin forming on his face. His mouth hung open slightly to show some teeth as he did so and as he stared at her, his hand automatically reached toward his pencil. While his right hand was busy preparing the pencil, Dimitri lifted his left and closed one eyes as he looked up at her from behind the fingers of his left hand which almost looked like they were measuring something. Then his index finger moved downward.

“Click. Gotcha,” he spoke with some obvious concentration hidden away in his voice. With that said Dimitri looked back down toward his paper and erased the lines he had drawn on the face earlier. They were all wrong for her face. Her ears were lower than the top of her brow, her eyes were smaller, and her lips a little rounder.

Instead of taking ages on it, Dimitri simply scribbled in what he had been looking at a few moments ago. Once he had it, he didn’t even have to glance back up. Her face was stuck in his mind and wouldn’t fade away until he had it on this paper. Perfect or not, he just needed an outline. This picture wasn’t exactly stunning in the first place.

Once he had finished his work, he tapped his pencil tip thoughtfully against the paper. Mostly because he wasn’t sure if it was finished. He was looking for a flaw. Nothing little of course since it was just a little doodle really. Just anything big that he had messed up on. Then he remember the eyes that had been trying to look over his knees at the picture earlier. He remember that the girl was sitting there.

“You can just ask, if you wanted to see,” he stated simply as he turned his eyes back up toward her. He then placed the pencil on his backpack and slid his sketch book up on the top of his knees so that she could see. It wasn’t long before he let it slide onto the top of the seat while he pushed himself forward in his seat and leaned in toward her so that he could look over his little doodles as well. Now that he could see them, they made him feel a bit frustrated with himself and it showed. His brows furrowed and he shook head to himself as he stared down at it. “That’s what I get for not taking my time. And slouching for all I know.”

Dimitri gave a little laugh and smiled again as he tore his gaze away from the drawings to look up at Alena.