Lena

remembered a summer lightning storm when she was in middle school. She was wide awake at midnight and bravely made her way down the stairs in her nightgown to sit on the front porch and watch. A burst of lightning flashed, midnight became noon, and Lena was jarred to see that all the things in the mysterious night world were exactly the same as they were in the cheery, prosaic day.
After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.
But after that she'd started drawing and painting and had to unravel all the convincing she'd done. There was no way to access a visual reality beyond what you saw. Reality was what you saw. "We are trapped in our senses," her old teacher, Annik, told her once. "They are all we have of the world."
And so they are the world, Lena remembered thinking then, and many times since.

Why did she spend so much of her life unlearning? It was so much harder than learning, she mused as she timidly made her way around Leo's canvas.
She was almost afraid to look--scared of its being worse than it was supposed to be but more scared of its being better.
She waited until she was fully in front of his painting to take it on.
After three days in the studio, his painting was really only begun. More suggestion than execution. And yet it was so far beyond hers she felt like crying. Not just because her looked so amateurish in comparison, but also because his had a gesture and a quality, even at this young stage, that was unaccountably sad and lovely.
She was devoting her life to art school, and she knew she could learn a lot of things here, but in a flash of recognition, she also knew that this couldn't be taught. She couldn't say why this painting struck her so, what was the particular insight into the pathos of Nora, but she felt it. And she felt her own set of standards and ambitions swirling down the toilet.
She could practically hear the flush.
She put her fingers to her eyes, unnerved to feel actual wetness. She had hoped those would be conceptual tears, not wet ones.
She thought of Leo. His hair and his hand. She tried to reconcile the look of him with this painting.
And in a rush she felt ashamed of her fatuous games as she realized she was going to be thinking about him whether or when or how he ever looked at her.

From
Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
by Ann Brashares