It’s not the hands that are the issue, it’s the memory.
A dozen slips of paper lay discarded upon the floor of his tent, left to blow away in the wind of the open front. He doesn’t care about them, they’re wrong.
Again, and again, they’re wrong.
It’s not the scale that’s the issue – never mind that he isn’t used to working so small, he can do it. Just the right curve, right weight, right thickness. His hands are used to detail work, though perhaps not in such quantity.
It’s not that perfectionism has never been an issue to him – though usually it doesn’t bring so much frustration, doesn’t sink its teeth in so deeply and hang on quite so long. Small details and bits got wrong that he would work on trying to make right. Overwork, often, until a drawing was ruined and abandoned to the wind or to a flame. But he’d learned to accept the smaller mistakes, let them pass him by even when they bothered him. Else nothing would ever be finished.
But this time even the small ones count, can’t be overlooked. Even on a small scale – perhaps about the size of a gil - it mattered. Every single detail. That it came out right.
But it wouldn’t.
Always, always something wrong. The curve of an eye, the twist of the mouth, the fall of the hair, angle of the chin, cut of the jaw. Always wrong, wrong, wrong.
No one would know but him. Any random onlooker would see the detail poured into the drawing that could fit twice into their palm, and call it a success.
But it’s not if it looks good that matters, it’s if it looks right.
And that’s where the distress comes in, that starts to flicker in his chest. Because it doesn’t look right, and he doesn’t know how to make it look right.
Because his memory is starting to blur, fade at the edges, failing to conjure up a face he’d assumed impossible to forget. But when he tries, it’s not quite right. He can’t quite remember. The twist of his smile, the depth of his brow, the precise angle of the slight tilt he often held his head at. He can’t quite remember.
And that’s wrong. Alarmingly wrong.
And as he stares down at his fifteenth attempt – further a resemblance than any of the previous ones – and his careful hands falter, drag a heavy line through the drawing before he crushes the charcoal stick in his hand and throws it outside the tent in his frustration.
He digs through the others. Looks through them slowly.
And they’re all wrong.
That one’s wrong,
As is that one,
As is that one…
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
And that one… that one’s almost right. But almost right is still wrong.
A perfectly nice drawing, but he knows it’s wrong, though he can’t place how, or why, or what can be done to make it right.
No, it’s not the hands that are the issue, it’s the memory.
