I know, how strange just to sit and watch, all that I know, go past in a flurry. Soundless figures, silhouettes and faces that once meant something. Like the multicolored tones of the clicking and clacking of typing, on a keyboard, high wired connections making sounds out of plastic. But I did it, I sat there and waited, because that’s what I do. It’s not peculiar, nor strange, I’ve checked with my doctor, everyone does it. Apparently.
No one disturbs me, I’m fine, sat on my own, with the sun seeping down, petting my shoulder with its stirring fronds, gold shimmers of old happy days.
I don’t know why but I think somethings watching me, I say to the only thing listening. Obviously, there’s no one. I’m alone. Alone, save a dim shadow making its way across the floor. It’s a bee. Flitting about, toing and froing, taking pleasure in flight above a battleground of statues, fields of mourning, enjoying the lengthy trip it takes, to get, to me. Enjoying, rejoicing, in being a bee. Threadbare yet resplendent in its tainted golden armour, like polarized sunglasses sat on a shelf. Now it turns and it floats until it finds its perch on the dark, burnished frame of an old, golden painting.
This painting, this picture, I’ve painted, I am the painting, you see, it is me. The blending of chalk and sunspots and rays, a frozen stretch of limitless antipathy, settled in its frame of simplicity. I am the painting. Look at me. Here someone comes now to take a quick look. But no, not even that, one step and she turns, nothing to see here. As she steps away, the next one comes along.
The painting. My painting. Me. One moment, majestic. The next, disregarded. Its sat here so long, each person arriving, departing, and I’m crying. Yet not a sound, not a word, just a glance then the scuffle and squeak of their boots, of their feet, as the rest of them swing round, move towards another picture, another face, another painting.
What’s keeping them, you ask. Well nothing, really, save the earmarks of a time once lost, now gone, a story once told. So why, why would you sit and stare at it for hours. Clearly you don’t. You just turn your gaze and go.
If they had only known, what it took to make that picture. The time that it took. For that girl in the picture, to let it all out, to tell the world it was strength and not fear that led her to painting.
The pain of a world she wants left in her painting. A painting of gold, of colour, of mould, of nothing, of everything, of who it reminds her of, of what it still could be.