Essay n. 1 The Shell of Despair When I was a teenager, maybe four or five years old, I came face to face with despair. At the time, I didn't know that this would be the closest encounter I would have with it, but I knew I was encountering it. I had a friend from kindergarten who was my best friend. He lived in my neighborhood and we always played together. Then one day she called me and I expected a happy voice if I wanted to come to her. Instead I heard a confused and perplexed voice coming from the phone. To quote her verbatim, she said, “Andrew, I think my cousin is dead. My parents said he committed suicide." None of us knew what it meant, nor was it explained to us. So I went to his house and his father asked me if I wanted to go with them. I could tell he was very sad because he was usually an absolute madman... the good kind. So I went with them, knowing I could offer some consolation in the form of happiness. We went home and on the car ride learned the definition of suicide. The act of killing oneself defines suicide. Then we drove silently and somberly home. Immediately, I saw bright colors, almost as if someone had dropped neon paint everywhere. The grass as green as a Granny Smith apple stretched out before me, opening up into a great hill. At the top of the hill, a sunflower-colored house perches, almost like a yellow canary perches on a branch. The runway, of course, was a bright red, almost hot pink. In the back yard there was a swing set with blue swings. Back there, hanging from a tree, was an unused climbing rope. I saw my friend's father point to the rope and the mother gasp, tears streaming down her cheeks. It was a strange state for me to be in, especially as a child. I entered the bright house... center of the card... north. Despair is shown throughout the poem both in the morbid sense of the poem, and in the deeper meaning of the poem. The last two lines capture this perfectly. Because if “Love is a naked shadow on a gnarled, naked tree,” then love must be lost when the soul of a human being is lost. In both the painting and the poem, a human soul is said to be lost to a lynching. Through their works, both artists tell the story of a lynching and how it broke the hearts of “the people who were reluctant to leave.” It also showed how, through the loss of a loved one, abandonment is a mutual feeling, as no one can soothe the pain of despair. Together, in both the poem and the painting, desperation is shown as a cold soul, clinging to anything that lets it in. Because without the shell of an empty human being, desperation could not strut around, pretending to be a human being..