I carry my studio on my back— a zippered spine of graphite ghosts and half-dried gels. The laptop is a cold hearth. The Wacom, a patch of synthetic earth where I plant no seeds, only vectors.
My tools know me better than lovers do. The brush tool remembers the tremor in my wrist the night I learned grief has no CMYK equivalent. The pen tool, that cruel Cartesian, demands anchors where I want to bleed. I close paths because closure is the only export setting that doesn’t crash the soul. deskpack illustrator
At night, I pack up: tablet into sleeve, stylus into its velvet sarcophagus. The backpack sighs—a lung full of unused gradients, of sketches for a comic about a girl who turns into fog. I zip it shut. But the work leaks. It always leaks. A single pixel under my fingernail. A layer named sadness set to Multiply. An artboard that stretches from my sternum to the edge of what I’ll never be paid to say. I carry my studio on my back— a