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fifty-six.

੭୧ 𝐩𝐢𝐩𝐞𝐫 ੭୧

The white canvas sat below me. Lifeless. Hollow. Empty. I let my hand coast along the bristles of my brush, pulling it gently against the blank surface as if it could inspire something, anything inside of me.

My entire body felt as though it was empty, as if the wind could pick me up and blow me away at any moment. I had felt like that ever since the moment I had left, and I wondered if this is what the beginning of death felt like. I had only felt that once before.

When my mother died.

I tried, harder than I had ever tried before, to conjure up an image in my mind. An idea, something to create. I thought of flowers and rainbows, and beautiful scenes straight out of the movies. I thought of the sunset on the beach and the ocean at dusk and everything I had ever loved to look at before, but each time my brain tried to paint something on the canvas, I'd feel the cold, dark feeling in my gut, the weight in my limbs that wouldn't allow me to move the brush in the way I needed.

Painting—something I loved, something I felt as if I needed, the thing that I thought could bring me comfort, that I had turned to in moments of crisis. Painting felt hollow.

It was as if the paint, the brush, my fingers, they weren't mine. They were a strangers. An alien feeling settled in the bottom of my stomach, and I wanted nothing more than to let myself slip away with it. I wanted to curl into my bed and fade into a nothingness that didn't require me to feel or breathe or move or create.

The apartment floor was cold beneath my legs, and I thanked it silently for holding me in its unrelenting grip, as if reminding me that I still existed, even when everything around me felt fake. My mantra—you do not break—had been on repeat in my mind throughout the week I had been home. It felt like a broken record.

I was broken, and there was no point in trying to convince myself otherwise.

I wasn't sure when, exactly, I had begun painting. All I knew were the red streaks that marred the canvas as I begun painting the scene from my birthday night—but the blood wasn't Reece's, it wasn't Greyson's; it was mine, a broken heart, leaking. An empty, broken, lifeless husk of what once had been.

Tears dripped onto the canvas, and the paint bled, making it look like a bloodbath. I let my eyes focus on it for a moment longer, before letting out a sob that rattled in my rib cage and burned my lungs, letting the brush drop against the floors—staining them red as I snapped the canvas in half, my breath ragged and harsh, echoing off of the empty walls.

My body crumpled into itself as my sobs overtook me, and it felt as though there wasn't an ounce of energy left in my body, the pain of what had happened consuming me and eating me from the inside out, pulling me apart limb by limb, my soul bleeding.

I knew, at that moment, I could have laid there until the cold floor stole what warmth I had left, and the weight of my own grief crushed me. Grief for the girl who loved so blindly, so freely. For the girl who thought that maybe, just maybe, her heart had found the perfect place to settle, for good.

For the girl who was now realizing that it was all too good to be true.

My eyes focused on the mangled canvas, on the smears of blood red paint that bled and marred and tore at what was once a pristine canvas, and I realized I wasn't the same, either.

I wasn't whole anymore.

And I certainly was not an artist.

✧

"I know, I'm sorry."

Moving the phone away from my ear, I rested my head against the couch and closed my eyes, willing away the headache that had begun to pound behind my temples as Mr. Beaurigard went on his thousandth rant about my thoughtlessness, laziness, unprofessionalism...blah, blah, blah.