We felt a very specific kind of burning shame about this September piece. We'd been drawing at work over breaks nearly every day, and we would always bring back our drawings, proud, as "proof we went to work today". It was only two or three weeks after we started work at this point, and we already had a neat little pile. We'd shared all of them with our mom and sister.

The reception was always kind, pleasant, certainly interested even if the word was unspecific. The reception on this one was ostensibly similar, but its expression - stunted in silence. When we asked, huh, what...? They explained.

Both of them thought they were looking at sex. One of them probably suggested this seemed like scissoring. The other commented that they both looked very into it, passionate.

We didn't know what to say, we just flushed - offended, but how do you take offense at a comment like that? It's your own art. They're only telling what they see. It's not their fault if what they see isn't what you drew.

We must have tried to explain it. They were just hugging, spinning themselves around each other, so happy to see and feel each other, but - nothing rude. Nothing rude!

It felt like a lost cause from the start. We'd been proud of this piece, but it didn't show itself quite the way we saw it. Everyone knew we drew "porn", nude stuff; they'd both seen some of it. Nevermind that we exclaimed we would never just shove that sort of art on them, or that we always left our sketchbooks in our own room only open to our safe works. Nevermind that it would be ridiculous to try something like that, at work, in public, anyway. They would see what they saw. That was the only way.

We never told them what we thought had been burningly obvious from the start. These "characters" are us. The prospect our mom and sister thought was real had connotations, for us, about as harsh as drunkenly sending an unsolicited nude. It hurt that they thought we would.

It also hurt that our first real attempt at drawing ourselves touching each other was construed as sex. We can't say the word "touching" without it sounding like innuendo. That's always been a problem for us, always since we heard it first, but why, why did it apparently have to carry into our art? Couldn't we be free, here? Couldn't we just be?

It's funny now to look on all the pieces we did before this one. The photo is from before we came home, too. (That's our table at work; those are our pencils we drew with.) It's a simple innocence that died in one moment, as all things do. This time, though, we have the very last moment captured. Nothing can take that we liked this drawing. Nothing can take that we still do, now.