Cleaning the storage space at home, I encountered my old sketchbook with still lifes from a drawing class I took in college. We were practicing shading techniques.

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When I found them, the drawings looked unfamiliar, as if I were seeing them for the first time. Then, slowly, I remembered that I’d created those drawings of bones, eggs, a plant. I couldn’t remember seeing each particular configuration of objects, but I remembered feeling peaceful standing there looking at the thing, trying to reproduce the shapes, watching the image emerge on the page in pencil, charcoal, or ink.

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A memory of the18-year-old me began to take form. I was wearing a pair of combat boots and torn-up, tight black jeans with an oversized grey flannel shirt. I was standing in front of a wooden easel among other students in a sunny, high-ceilinged art studio. The slender stems of a Monstera plant reached out from a large terracotta pot sitting on a platform in the middle of the room. It had rich green, heart-shaped, Swiss-cheese leaves.

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The instructor was my first-ever Black teacher who introduced himself as a draftsman on the first day of class. He walked among us as we worked, sometimes pausing to offer feedback.

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He wrote grades and comments on the back left corner of each of my drawings. The highest grade I received was a B+ for an animal spine. Maybe it came from a deer? Along with my grade, the instructor wrote that the top was too narrow. The lowest grade I received was a C- on a pair of deer skulls.

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Skulls and spines, drawing the bones of dead animals--it sounds barbaric, and yet there was peace in their stillness, in the rendering of them on the page. I wonder how old those bones were.

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The idea behind Día de los Muertos is remembering loved ones who’ve passed away, so their spirits never die. Those deer bones were preserved in charcoal by my own hand. Still alive in 2025, on the pages of my old sketchbook.

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I tried to inhabit the mind of that 18-year-old, who took art classes her freshman year at a university in Massachusetts, a place that seemed so far away from the Bronx neighborhood where she grew up. That 18-year-old had to fend for herself against microaggressions as well as macroaggressions, even before we had words for those things. Her shield was a façade of fuck-you strength and punk-rock confidence.

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Here’s what I would say to the 18-year-old me: All your drawings are beautiful.

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