Exposition.

Colour.

You're ripped at every edge, but you're a masterpiece,
And now you're tearing through the pages and the ink.

-Colors, Halsey.

*

Five months, twelve days and nineteen hours after his death, she opened the doors to the art studio once again.

Paint, Sharon had told her. It helped you once, it'll help you again. Armed with this advice and an arguably strong resolve, she unlocked the giant hardwood doors that had, until six months ago, never been locked before.

The first thing that hit her was the smell. Half a year's worth of drying oil paint locked in a room didn't exactly make for the most pleasant of odours. But in this environment, with its smell (and perhaps due to it), she felt right at home.

The room was exactly as she had left it, but for the fact that there was now a fine layer of dust on everything. She spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning, letting the feeling of simply being in the room sink in. For the first time in several months, the grief of her loss took a backseat as her activity took up the better part of her attention.

At around five o'clock that evening, she finally finished cleaning the place. She stood in the centre of the room, surveying her work, when her eyes fell on the shelf holding all her paints. Lined up and categorised according to shade, her collection of seventy- eight bottles of oil paint was an obsessive compulsive individual's dream come true. You're the most organized person I've met, he'd say to her exasperatedly, and you're a painter, for Christ's sake. You're supposed to be messy!

For some odd reason, this simple memory managed to elicit a grin from her. She hadn't smiled in so long, her facial muscles ached from the new way they were twisted in. Your smile is as beautiful as the dawn of day, he had said to her once. Quite unsurprisingly, they both burst out laughing. She made him promise to never, ever try such cheesy lines on again. That memory just made her smile wider.

She picked up a bottle off the shelf and examined its contents. Oh well, she thought, nothing a little bit of turpentine can't repair. Soon, she was engaged with the copious task of adding the precise amount of the solvent to each bottle, and ensuring that the paint reached the perfect consistency. When the last bottle was finally in its place, it was nearly nine.

She took a random bottle off the shelf, not realising that she had picked the exact shade of his eyes until she opened the bottle. The gorgeous olive-yet-sea-green hue was the aspect of his that had caught her attention in the first place.

It was only then that she realised that she needed to put brush to canvas. The effect of six months without the stroke of a brush reared its face and she was overcome with a desire to let it all out. Soon, her easel was up and a pristinely white square of canvas rested on it, begging to be filled with a kaleidoscope of colour.

Her hand began to move of its own accord. The deft movements of her wrist soon created a charcoal outline. The blurry drawing only gave a vague idea of what went where, but for her trained eyes, it was more than enough.

As she filled the outline with colour, she couldn't help but feel as though the process was cathartic. Every swirl of the brush seemed to extricate the pain that had buried itself deep inside her. Every brush stroke seemed to fill the hollow pit in her stomach, and by the time she decided she was convinced that the painting was perfect, she felt as though she had healed herself.

She stood back and admired her handiwork. His face seemed to be grinning out at her, as though he was about to just leave the painting and make a sarcastic comment about her paint-splattered T-shirt. His eyes sparkled mischievously and his lopsided smile displayed the gap between his front teeth. One of his eyebrows was cocked up, as though he was scrutinizing her for anything that would allow for adequate teasing material.

Just then, golden sunlight flooded the room through the open French window. It illuminated the painting and gave it a brilliantly luminescent appearance. So I painted through the night, she thought, only then becoming aware of her weariness. She looked at his portrait, which now seemed to be silently chastising her for her silliness. She grinned broadly as she thought about another occasion when she had pulled an all nighter. At this rate, he said to her when he brought her coffee that morning, I'll have a zombie for a girlfriend.

She sauntered to the window and just stood there for a while with closed eyes, letting the warmth of the early morning sunlight rejuvenate her tired body. A cool breeze fluttered in, clearing up her foggy mind. The dazzling sun behind her shut eyelids temporarily blinded her, but she stayed, and eventually got used to it.

The pain was still there, it just hurt a little less.

*

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