Art Imitates Life

• Lily Parsons, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2021

The days and nights blend together in a spectacular demonstration of the earth's beauty. In a similar way, her careful strokes blur the beginnings and endings of the deep blues and greens of the vast ocean she paints alone within her four-walled sanctuary. The glassy waves should be bursting with energy, dolphins frolicking and fish shoaling, yet the little artist leaves them bare and barren.

As the days become weeks, colourful words dance out of her imagination, charge determinedly through her body, and flow through her fingertips onto the keys of her computer, injecting life into the stories she creates. She writes tales you've heard before; of princesses trapped in towers, isolated from loved ones, with red-spiked monsters keeping them paralysed in fear. In some ways, her fiction piece is auto-biographical.

The weeks are piling up; it's easier to count them as months. She listens to her mother and father sit at the piano that has been untouched for years. Lively melodies permeate the home, stealing the attention of the older brother who is seldom seen outside of the study. The family joined together in the family room for the first time since the house was bought.

Back in her room, the little girl stages an improvised drama, a product of her youthful imagination. Her dolls don blue tissue paper mouth coverings and frequently wash their plastic palms with pocket-sized sanitiser. Throughout her play, the dolls remain two arms lengths away from each other.

As she is tucked into bed each evening, her night light illuminates her most recent creations; paintings, stories, scripts and photos. Each piece fitting together like a puzzle, making up the picture of her locked down life.

She can't define 'pandemic', but she knows it defines her way of life.