rain » vkook

one

"concrete jungle," i say, voice straining against its ties to sleep. "who are you?" it bursts through its bindings on the last word, shattering the silence and alerting no one to the fact that i am awake.

"i'm jeongguk," i say. "i'm picasso. i'm thomas edison. but i'm not ernest hemingway."

i continue to ramble until i've made breakfast and i'm too awake to justify these words pouring out of me. 

"i'm not ernest hemingway," i say one last time to my quiet room. then i go outside, walk the five minutes to my little studio and flip the sign so that my sacred space may fill with sinners. 

i mix my thoughts with the paint, staining my fingers with the lie that my thoughts are beautiful - but in my studio, they are. 

then i get customers. they only look at my paintings for a second - they like to blame their little fast-paced world for their short attention spans, but the truth is that none of them care enough. none of them realize that beauty occurs when you slow down and stop and just breathe. just stare at something until you can see its lines and read between them.

so they buy my paintings and bring them home where they will gather dust. they aren't meant to hold anything besides the pieces of my mind that get away from me, but at these other houses, they will hold short glances. short glances and moments that their buyers wish to hide. 

art has eyes, and humanity's mistakes beg to be seen.

i sell art and i sell redemption. i sell my thoughts so that i can be rid of them - where my paintings end up, there are no thoughts.

my first customer of the day comes in with a nasally voice and a bad attitude. she surveys my formless people and the juxtaposition of detail and no detail.

"do you have anything...happy?" she asks, smacking her lips.

"that's up for you to interpret," i say. she doesn't recognize the statement for what it is - a challenge. will she be able to put her mind to use? can she see the lines? can she read the spaces between them?

she ends up selecting a painting a drawn-out eternity later, beaming.

"this one is happy," she says. i ring her up and she hands over the money and leaves with her new treasure, the thing that reminds her of happiness.

the painting was an abstract image of a boy standing atop a cliff. the colors around him were bright, but the lines making up his body were heavy and sloped down, pointing to the rocks below the cliff. he was about to jump.

i hope that one day, she looks at the painting when she's so drunk she can't see and realize that she was an idiot. 

and so it goes.

the day is gray, and i stare up at the clouds, content with the nothingness they make me feel. usually i feel too much - i am a tightly wound ball of string, and each string is a different emotion - bitterness, sadness, anger, jealousy, spite. at the heart is naivety, wonder, and hope, but the ball is so tangled that they're more like memories now. and looking at the pearly clouds make me forget.

the rain is even better. 

the rain almost makes me believe that i am someone else - someone whose eyes see the right reality, someone whose brain works the right way. and the rain almost makes me believe that i can be that person.

but most of all, the rain reminds me that i am jeon jeongguk. i am me and everyone else is themselves and if i squint, we all look the same. 

as if the clouds are privy to my thoughts, they open up with a torrent that is only achingly gentle to me; rain pounding the ground but caressing the air as it falls. and the sound. god, i love the sound of rain.