Artgirl

19// asleep

ARTGIRL 19: asleep (take two)

"the world gives you so much pain and here you are making gold out of it. –there is nothing purer than that." –rupi kaur

zoey willow hunter

I HAD SO MUCH ART GROWING INSIDE OF ME, I was afraid that it would crush my lungs when it blossomed out.

The piles and piles of unused paint had finally exceeded their limit and ended up spilling all over my body; tainting it so deeply that even my blood was a swirling hurricane of colors. Blue, red, black before it crossed my heart, and lilac, red, yellow afterwards. I woke up before the sun did, made a cup of chamomile tea and decided to challenge the sky; whichever one would create the most colors in the least amount of time would win.

I won, over and over again.

My right hand fluttered over the paintbrush, as if trying to forget the feel of it. My left hand became a mistress that slowly made the brush feel like this is home. A home that was being constructed brick by brick, but it was getting there, one way or another.

The new art was desperate. It was avid—a confused swirl of colors. The precision was gone now, replaced instead with more pronounced colors. A focus on forms and softer angles came with freedom of mind. I let myself go, detached myself from the burnt wings that came with the past few months.

The same wings I used to navigate through a new love, a new country and a new life were now too singed to be used to fly. I got a divorce from my own body and stood before my paint set-up bare, with nothing but my soul encompassed around me. I didn't need wings, I could be anything I wanted. I could create anything I wanted.

I could puke all of the obese melancholy that had created clots in my heart onto a canvas again. And the paintings born out of it weren't beautiful. They were tragic, they made Jessie cry, they reached out to the world, took its hand and made it feel what they felt. From the serenity that came with finding myself falling for a boy that could, this time, keep my heart safe, to the heartbreak that came with thinking that I could never paint again.

I was seeing everything as art. Maybe I was seeing a reflection of all that I'd missed out on, being locked as my own mind's prisoner, but I'd never felt more alive.

So, when I walked into the meeting with Georges Nash, I was an eagle. Ruthless, ready to fight for my store. My hair was on fire and I'd dressed up to look like it. Touches of red, a little bit of green. Enough black to remind him that color could be lost as much as it could be found.

He stood tall when he saw me. He wasn't like I expected him to be; old and sharp. His charm was alarming, but I came prepared to face worse than him. "Zoey Hunter, I presume?"

"You presume correctly," I shook his hand. I sat down at the same time as him, crossed my legs.

"Why isn't your partner here?" He asked. He leaned back in his chair like he owned the world, but what he didn't realize was that his world was equally as big as mine. "I thought there were two of you."

"There is," I didn't let any sign of amity seep through. "Only one of us could make it. We've got a shop to handle, as you know."

He smiled, and my stomach curdled. "Really? I didn't know. It's such a small, insignificant store, I almost forgot about it."

"That store is what you want, though, isn't it?"

"Indeed. And what I want, I get."

The twisted look in his eyes made me very tempted to punch him in the face, at least then, he'd have some color. "I guess that's something we have in common, then. I'm here to elaborate on the deal discussed on the phone," my voice was sharper than his jaw line. "A deal that isn't childish, that isn't a waste of your time, that actually contributes to your success."