The task is simple: draw a freehand circle.
Something, something, practice makes perfect, something something, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. She wasn’t degrading her wrist for some hypothetical flip-the-trolley-lever theory in a vacuum, though. This was no psychological 72-hour-stabbing torment in search of enlightenment. Sometimes, the wagon is red because the poet likes that color. She wanted to draw a perfect circle all by herself, end discussion.
Bubbles. Halos. Empty eyes. Top-view of a glass of water. Balls of cookie dough with no chocolate chips. Unshaded spheres. Globes with no continents. A Declaration of Independence from stencils and protractors. Interpretation is your nemesis. It’s a distraction, a temptation for you to quit and call it your own stylized version of a circle, but that’s not what a circle is. Her goal was to map all the points at a specific radius from the center in one clean stroke.
She’d like to erase all traces of herself in these circles. She wouldn’t call herself a conformist. Her Starbucks order was a bizarre off-menu concoction, her email password was a jumbled string of special characters with letters and numbers interspersed, her bottom-of-the-receipt signature was large and loopy and impossible to read, but to flood away these idiosyncrasies into one perfect product would be sublime. Drawing a circle should’ve been simple, but it was the antithesis of the amalgamation of lines and curves that made up the English alphabet. In theory, the letter O should be a circle, but in her hand it was a tall oval.
She experimented with slow, jagged deliberation, but it bled the ink of her pen too thick. She wanted clean, thin lineart. A millimeter is titanic, and that was a tough enough conclusion to accept. It made more sense with consideration to the 99.99% of invisible germs killed with hand sanitizer. A strand of hair is an ant’s jump rope. A drop of water is an ocean to a microbe. Her eyes, shining with cerulean interest, are a galaxy compared to my insignificant ponderings and pointless stuttering.
She attempted rapid turns of the wrist, guided by impatient impulse, but those came out as lopsided as an ice cream cone under a hot magnifying glass. By the Goldilocks principle, somewhere in the sweet middle should’ve granted her a few degrees closer to her goal. But she wasn’t drawing circles in theory, she was drawing circles on a white piece of printer paper snatched from her office. And she should be getting better at this, but these were circles, and humans were so riddled with evolutionary incompetencies suited towards a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that supposedly, drawing a circle freehand was a Sisyphean task.
I watched her flood her paper with enough circles to make someone trypophobic. She was perched on her swivel chair with her knees up, hair up, craned over her paper, biting her tongue. That’s all I was in her life, a witness to glory. Encircled by her ballpoint precision.
It is a simple task: draw a freehand circle.