Colors

Dipping her brush tip lightly into the paint, she smiled faintly. Colors, colors, colors. She slowly and delicately drew her brush over the canvas, the bristles gliding over the dips and ridges, leaving wet hue-globs to spread and settle and soak into permanence. One must be careful with paint, she knew, for the simple reason that once pure white was stained, there was no eraser or bleach or water with which to clean mistakes away. And so she led her brush in an elegant sky-dance that spoke of clouds and fog and distant blue-white dreams in which ships that sailed over cirrus-seas harbored in docks nestled among the untouchable white heaven-wisps, and a place where you don’t need a ladder to reach out and grasp the spirit of the sun. Where next would she place her paint? What new forms could she dream up from nothing but her imagination and the baby pinks, cotton-blues, marshmallow whites, and other colors that lay in wait upon her palette?

It was of utmost delight and surprise to her when new colors crept upon her tablet. There was a time when she found an inky black upon it, and oh! How she loved to admire its depth and potent qualities! It glimmered and shined and drip, drip, dripped its way about its designated area, testing its boundaries. And when she swirled her favorite light colors into it, she boggled over how it devoured them seemingly without a trace, and wondered how much of her marshmallow whites could go into it before it would break and lift into a less dreary shade of gray.

When she finally braved dipping the soft hairs of her brush into its depths, it was of supreme ecstasy to her mind, and a glorious blessing to her art. Across her recycled window into her imagination, she blended her colors with the inky black to form scarlets and bleeding greens for exquisite young roses, midnight blues and sleeping indigos for nighttime dreamscapes, and melting ceruleans and dying, aging browns and oranges for autumn leaves on forest trails, where lovers escape and make love in the last living grasses of the season, beneath thunderstorms that connect the lands of the earth and the regions of the sky through fluid strings of rain. And when she used the black alone, no matter how she slew it upon her canvas, it produced the same, same, same form; the same beautiful body, the same seraphic silhouette, the same shimmering shadow.

Is there a point, she wondered, when an artist slips into a state in which she no longer controls the brush, and the brush controls her? Or, furthermore, where the shapes and desires of the painting controls her? Is this state the perfect personification of ultimate beauty and loveliness, of which all seek and don’t know they dream of, or one of endless danger and imminent disaster? She did not know the answer, nor if she cared to know the answer. Death for such exquisite beauty as this seemed worthy of the risk, and so she risked, risked, risked.

She continued to paint, and admired the beauty of it, and cleaned colors from her palette that seemed to dirty or corrupt it, despite not knowing exactly from where that beauty stemmed.

On a fateful day of painting her heart’s most vivid destination-thoughts in their dripping visual embodiments, she reached to scoop more of the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful black atop her utensil of dream solidification, she was surprised to find that her stash was all but empty. Confused and dazed, she reached again, but the thick ebony liquid had dreamed itself away. She turned to look for her marshmallow whites and other happy hues, but found them missing too. They were replaced by colors she did not recognize by name nor by nature. Perhaps her black had transformed into one of these, too? The colors she now beheld were colors of future and progress, and perhaps of hope and of love and of adulthood, but she immediately loathed them, as they threw her into a panicked confusion and indescribable and unbearable pain and longing, if even by her own doing. She cried out bitterly against the seething lore of the unfamiliar colors and endless hurt, hurt, hurt.

The most painful action, however, was when she raised her head to her unfinished artwork, her only remains of black and white and the colors they’d told secrets to and enjoyed together and lived and dreamed and hadn’t finished imagining together, and every other way they’d formed thousands and thousands of tints and shades in nearly one beautiful sweeping motion of unity and balance.

As these thoughts hit her mind, her vision began to swim, and she suddenly saw the black again. But this time, it enveloped her entire range of sight and skewed the shapes of all other objects. The black no longer glimmered and glistened with dark beauty and grandeur; now it was absolute, terrifying, and empty, empty, empty.

Then it disappeared, and she felt it glide down her cheek and crawl across her chin, then splash onto her palette as the ebony paint she knew on one side, and the white paint she’d had on the other. She touched them with her fingertips, only to find both colors tainted by the sullen gray-peach of her skin color.

Her imagination probed, she gazed at her painting once more, and touched the canvas with no soft-bristled brush, and no glistening paint but her hands, which the paper began to soak. Delighted, with black and white streams of color smeared across her face, she rose and moved closer, allowing the page to envelop her arms and legs and body. In a few moments, there was nothing left in the room but the colors she did not recognize, the painting she had not finished, and the brush she had not taken with her, and it rolled and did not cry on the floor, alone.

And yet, she was not in the painting.