Some people can draw a picture that looks exactly like the apple on the table in front of them,

With nothing but a pencil, and a single sheet of paper.

I have a box of pencils, sitting in a closet in my house.

Sometimes I look at the pencils, and I don’t draw.

I just look at each of them, and think about how different they are from one another.

One of them is sharp, and if you were a detective, you might come to the conclusion that that means one of two things:

Either I don’t use it very often,

Or, if you looked at how long it was, you would see that I used it the most.

I had worn it down so much, that I needed to sharpen it.

I had worn it down again and again, and now it’s just a nub.  

The pale wooden top of one of the pencils is smudged.

I don’t know how that happened, but I find myself hesitant to sharpen it,

For fear I would erase the mark.

That’s why that pencil is the dullest.

 When I draw an apple, I use all of the pencils.

My pictures aren’t super realistic,

But when I sit down in front of an apple with a sheet of paper,

I look at it like I look at those pencils.

I look at all the ways it doesn’t look like a picture.

There are no perfect circles, or squares whose sides are all the same lengths,

If you took a photo of it, from the angle I was looking at it, you wouldn’t be able to see the stem because of how it curved backward,

And even though light reflected off it, when it just sort of faded into the paper, I drew all of these things.

The fruit on my page didn’t really look like the fruit I was trying to draw,

But when I went to bed that night I dreamed of an apple,

And even though I had stared at it long enough to remember every detail about it,

Down to the green spot beside the stem,

The apple in my dream was my drawing, because in my dream I thought about all the ways a drawing looks like an apple,

Even a drawing that leaves a lot to be desired.

I don’t remember the whole dream, but it was something about how in both drawings and apples, every detail,

Every spot where the lines and curves changed direction was important.

Both detectives and artists have one thing in common.

They both look at those details,

A detective, to find the point where certain things meet, and an artist to draw a circle around that point,

And then, there are people like me who can’t draw perfect circles, so instead I draw apples, and I hang my up.

All of the pictures I drew of that apple look a little different,

But all of my drawings look like apples, and now those apples cover an entire wall.