November Will Remember

part IV

i.

Well, it seems like Solea figured out that the girl in my painting was more than just a figment of my imagination. She exists and she didn't just exist too, she wears kaleidoscopic colours with disfigured floral patterns and has tiny strings attached to the end of her shirts. Shirts that I keep folded neatly. And her clothes are in my drawer, her picture is on my wall. Lillian.

Solea must've connected the dots together but in all honesty I'm hoping she knows that Lillian is just what was and not what is.

"You're right. The clothes you hold belong to the girl in the picture. But it's not what you may think."

She smiles a little and jerks her chin towards me, "and what is it that I may be thinking?"

I don't know how, but I become shy all of a sudden. Fuck. I'm generally resistant to the effect of actions or words of people around me, but now I feel too shy to answer her question.

"It's just not like that," I answer stupidly. "She's not my girlfriend or anything."

Solea can make out the defensiveness in my voice, she probably doesn't know why I was defensive and so quick to say that Lillian wasn't my girlfriend, or someone special to me or someone who kept me up at night. Little did she know that it was herself who did that.

She tilts her head slightly to the right and now it's just the sound of the rain rapping at the window.

"You know Damien, I get you. I really do. It's that she isn't around, but her aura once spoke to you and it sparked your artistry. So when she's gone, you preserve her aura through your work and through her clothes, merely because it can never die. Because art is timeless, it just can't ever be killed."

She makes sense to me. Her words, her beliefs, her mind and her movements. To some, she may sound illogical and arbitrary but I can feel myself abiding to her words, my senses peaking, my world rising. She's telling me things that make me realise how I was blind to what I could already see but could not understand. And she's making me understand.

I blink. "Where did you even get that from?" I ask, eager to know.

"I could tell you, or you could find out yourself."

Unbelievable, this girl. Would she get angry if I asked her to cancel her plans and just spend the evening with me?

"I'll pick the latter," I say, "but please, what makes you think this way?"

She lets out a long breath, before sitting on my bed. I'm still standing near the window and Lillian's just got off her phone call and is heading towards the stairs.

"You'd know better than me, actually. Whenever an artist creates a painting or any article of work that he's put his time and energy in, he puts himself into it, he breathes his life force into it, and that's how it comes alive. That's what people say, I never agreed but then I saw it with my own eyes."

I stay quiet just because I like the sound of her voice and maybe I like her words even more. Her voice is soothing and yet it keeps the listener attentive, ready to absorb every word.

"So then I applied that concept with the people who we hold dear to us. We paint them with our emotions, we even breathe our life force into them and sometimes if we're lucky— the same is returned. The girl on your wall, she was art by herself, her own powerhouse of life's longing for itself. But you bared yourself through her, as you do with your work and that's why her aura still lives here, forever felt."

She's making me smile, she's fascinating me. It's like she's just there, always ready with a profound explanation for every theory she expounds on. "You know what..can't you stay for a longer time? Perhaps the entire evening, if that's okay with you."