The Bright Colours of Misery [COMPLETED]

𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙿𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙵𝙸𝙵𝚃𝚈 𝙵𝙾𝚄𝚁 -broken silence-

Have any of you been wondering if Heidi ever started painting again? Because if so, let me tell you. It was on May 9th 1945. The war had ended, Germany had surrendered and been occupied, Hitler had killed himself before all of this even happened. Berlin had been bombed to pieces, like many other cities across Europe.

Wilma and Heidi were still alive to see US troops walk through the city, which was nothing short of a miracle, which I knew more than anyone. Wilma and Heidi sat at their kitchen table, hearing the commotion going on outside and the incessant . You would think that a war ending would provoke some kind of strong emotion, but for these two young women, and many others, it was a time of confusion, and perhaps deeper hurt than during the war. Their brother Walter had not been declared dead, but he had been missing for months which made them pretty certain he was never coming home and all of their other family was gone, and never got to experience what they were living right now, the end of a war and the hopeful yet idiotic promise of everlasting peace. Then there was the uncertainty of it all, What would they do? Should they even stay in Berlin? This dusty, crippled city that didn't even seem to belong to anyone anymore.

"What happens now?" Heidi eventually asked Wilma, after a significant silence, briefly interrupted by screams and cries from the outside.

"I don't know." She said, another silence ensued until she stood up suddenly, heading toward their one dresser, she found Heidi's BDM uniform. She threw it on the table  reaching for a pair of scissors.

"What are you doing?" Heidi asked, her eyes wide. Wilma just started mindlessly cutting, putting her whole soul into it, ripping it to pieces with pure rage. Heidi slowly got up to grab a box of matches.

"Here." She said Wilma looked up to see Heidi extending the box to her. Wilma slowly took it, and with one swift movement, lit the match and watched it all burn.

The image of her sister, with a burning match in hand, ready to set her old uniform on fire, was the first thing Heidi painted after two years of being incapable of picking up a paint brush. Her attention to colours was immaculate, and the pure rage that Wilma was feeling, radiated through the paper. She finished it that same night, from memory with Oliver's old art supplies, she never showed it to Wilma. She had something else in mind.

The next day, she went outside, just outside her door and sat down, watching the few people that walked past her. In search of someone to paint, something to capture. After about an hour, two young children, one slightly older than the other, were skipped by her. They were smiling and giggling, but Heidi noticed the youngest had a bandage around their arm, stained with blood, it wasn't exactly a time where injuries were uncommon, but for some reason it caught her attention, and just as they had left she began her sketch of these two human beings that she probably never see again. She spent the rest of the week going to different parts of the city, whether they were safe or not for her wasn't exactly her top concern, she just made sure she found something or plenty of things to paint on little excursions. She used more paper during a singular week than what she had used in the past two years, and I couldn't help but notice Wilma's fond smile whenever she would find her painting. It was proof Heidi was healing.

After this productive and creative week, there were more than a dozen watercolour paintings in Heidi's possession. She signed them all with her initials in the top left corner, "Hfs" in simple ink letters decorated them all. She also gave them all small titles and once night had fallen, she tiptoed outside her apartment, and once she found an empty notice board, she pinned them all to it one by one and left them there, with no care in the world of who would see them, and what they would think, knowing only that she had put her art out there for the first time in her life and that she had broken her silent bubble, because she had learnt now, that being an observer was no good to anyone if you kept all your observations to yourself, in a comfortable silence.