XOEvy1yn Knows How to Freehand a Perfect Circle
For now she is 19 — young enough to be a prodigy — with her kitsch, and her camera, and her good technique.
Her livestream is the same thing every day, and people love it: she draws the circle, perfectly, then turns the circle into something representational, like a snow-globe, or a record-player, or a wedding ring.
XOEvylyn has fans. XOEvy1yn’s parents are mid-level diplomats. She tells her fans how, growing up, she never spent more than two consecutive years in a single country, and how she always feels lopsided whenever she remembers her heart is on the left side of her chest. She didn’t notice it at first, not until all the diagrams in health class, but it strikes her as imbalanced, unjust. She’s never had acquaintances or a home. She has a savings account, ad revenue, Patreon earnings. That’s what her life is.
XOEvy1yn doesn’t always know if what she does counts as art, or if she’s a real artist, but for now these things always work for her: the palimpsest, the layers she conquers dutifully, how she too was seven years old once, and overeager. Back then it was still the fibers in her sketchbook paper. The way they asked for so much, threatened to trip her, or split apart. Until she discovered it was really all about gentleness. You can’t be pressing down so hard, you have to do it in one deft penstroke. Like this: She reminds her audience — she’s always reminding people — that “circle” is also a verb. How practice makes perfect. How a phrase can be so clichéd, hackneyed and flat, but also worth believing.
It’s the middle of summer and she’s indoors again, turning her circle into a Christmas wreath. She fills in the ribbons, the blades of evergreen, and starts telling her audience about this theory she has: how the best artists who ever lived were the ones who talked about themselves very little. She makes sure to stipulate that this would exclude her, of course. She’s talking about herself right now, and 416 thousand people are listening. Her point is: back in the 1400s, or something like that, people couldn’t do what she does. People weren’t known the way she was known, so they sublimated all their unknowability into art that lasted. And then they died.
It’s the middle of summer, but it’s June 25, exactly six months from Christmas on either end, and everyone wants to believe she planned that intentionally. If you think about it, years are circles, too. So they cannot accuse her of being too early, or too late.
Audrey Snow Matzke is an autistic writer and student from Chicago, Illinois. She is a rising freshman at Colorado College, and tweets @audrey_matzke
