The Portrait in the Empty Canvas

Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me forever… Colour and I are one. I am a painter. – Paul Klee

It’s been two weeks since I last saw my wife alive. She died in the car accident after the truck hit us from the passenger side on a bright Tuesday morning. God doesn’t even give me the chance to use pathetic fallacy, seems like he doesn’t have even that much mercy on me.

It’s funny, we are with our loved ones nearly all the time, yet we only manage to say the things we really mean when there isn’t any time to say it, we always have time to scream and shout at each other, to point out each other’s flaws and to swear at each other. It’s only when we are in pain, or when time is our enemy that our true feelings come into play. But none of that matters does it? I mean, we are with those people because we know we love them, we don’t need to remind them all the time that we love them, in fact, it makes it worse when they tell us at the last minute; we will never have a chance to tell them again, or to hear it from their lips, they just fade into a memory for us to reminisce over a drink.

Here I am then, sitting alone in my house with paintbrushes and paints all around me. I’ve locked myself away from the world, I’m here to search for my own, I want to know life is worth the trouble. If I want to be melodramatic about the whole thing; I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be alive. Someone once told me that ‘every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity’. So, to that effect, I paint my wife. I paint the walls till there’s not one blank spot left. I paint the ceiling until I can look up and create a new sky. I paint the floor till I’m higher than heaven. I paint till I get away from it all. I paint. I paint a picture of my wife on a hill staring down onto a village drenched in sunlight over a night sky, because no matter how dark the nights are, morning will always come, and a new beginning will ensue. I paint a bird with wings of fire flying over an ocean. I paint a tree in the middle of a lonely field. I paint Atlas carrying my car on his shoulders. I paint a crowd of people with the same expressions in the middle of a busy town centre with a woman with a smile on her face in the middle. I paint.

The next morning, the doorbell rings. It’s my older sister Sophia. I let her in, well she lets herself in. She walks into the front room. She notices the paint all over me.

‘Looks like you haven’t been wasting your time.’ She says to me, it sounded sarcastic. But I can't show her what I've done. She won't understand.

‘Yeah, thought to myself, no point drowning myself in alcohol, might as well do it in paint’.

‘Good thinking’ she tells me, ‘get dressed and let’s go.’

‘Go where?’

‘I’m taking you out tonight; you’ve been stuck in here for too long, you know?’

‘I think I’m fine here.’

‘Ah come on, don’t you remember that party I had last week? With you and Rachel, you guys had fun, right?’

I don’t know what it is about her; she won’t leave me alone. I’m happy here, in my own world. I created this place to rid myself of memories, emotions; in here there is no future, which means there will be no past. No pain. Last week I let her take me to a party back in her flat, I went with my friend Rachel she’s one of those best friends you can get as close as you want and not be afraid of falling in love with her due to the fact that she’s a lesbian. We got there and got drunk till our heads were spinning, the blues, purples and blacks of the walls began to pop out and the smell of the room went into my lungs like the smoke of a cigar for the first time. I managed to break my sister’s friend’s nose and twist his arm so far to the point where he can’t use it anymore. He thought it was funny to make a joke about my dead wife, the thing was, it wasn’t funny.

‘I wouldn’t say it was the best fun I’ve had.’ I say to her.

‘Oh he had it coming anyway, he was being a dick.’

‘Regardless, I don’t want to go out there again!’

‘Wait…what do you mean, “out there”?’

‘Nothing, it meant nothing. Look, I’m kinda busy, call me later if you want.’

She leaves without saying a word. I walk into the kitchen and try to find a drink, I haven’t got anything here. I gotta go out to the shop. I’ll go in the morning.

I fall asleep, and as I dream, I see my wife’s favourite little, black notebook. I get up and pick it up; the room begins to glow in a shade of red. The walls I’ve painted begin to move like an ocean. I rub my eyes and they stop. I’m back in my bed. It was only a dream. I turn over and face the wall towards the wardrobe, the book is sitting on the table on her side of the table.

I wake the next morning and get dressed. I go for a drive to do some shopping. I drive into London to kill some time and look out at the world, to see how it’s doing. People going about their lives were something that my wife appreciated, she always told me to look out for the little things - she’d always be sketching in that book of hers. I always thought they were trivial. But nothing ever was to her. I drive towards Hyde Park, our favourite spot. A group of kids crowding around together taunting an old couple, drunkards walking out of the pub when it’s not even evening yet.

I sit down on a bench in the park and take my phone out, I need to talk to someone, I gotta try communicating again, I move down the list in my phone book and call Rachel.

‘Hello?’ she says on the other line.

‘Hey…’

‘Oh hey Xavier, how is it going?’ She seems cheerful for some reason.

‘I’m ok…thought I’d call, I came out here and-’

‘Sorry, one second, Xavier, something’s up with the phone’, she tells, what’s happening? I just wanted to talk to her. ‘Yeah, sorry, what were you saying?’

‘Nothing…it was nothing’.

‘I’ll come and see you later?’ I hung up before she could finish the sentence.

I’m driving towards Stratford station, it's one long drive, my Oyster should still work, I get out of the car and get on the train. I always came on here with my wife, we’d sit on the train for hours and stare outside the window, it was like our little getaway, the sunsets and I do nothing but stare at the sun pierce into the horizon. The orange sky blankets the world below it, it's safe here. These kids trying to be gangster get on the train and make a ruckus, I feel like punching their fucking heads in. By the time the sun sets the moon rises, I get back to my car and drive home. I see my best friend, Rachel, sitting in her car, waiting for me. What does she want?

I pull up the car on the driveway and turn the engine off. I stare out the windscreen at Rachel who just stares back at me, waiting for me. She’s like those annoying relatives who’ll keep bugging you to see if you’re doing ok because apparently, that’s the right thing to do.

‘Hello’, she says to me in a sombre tone, like I’m a stranger to her now, mind you, she’s the one who’s visiting me.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to see how you’re doing; it’s been a while since I saw you, and that call got me worried.’’

‘Yeah, it’s been a week, not like you haven’t seen me in a lifetime.’ That came out ruder than I expected it to be, but fuck if I care.

‘Can I come in?’ she ignores that comment, I put the in the hole and open the door, she walks in as if she still lives here. Shit. That’s bad narration; Rachel lived with me after the death of my wife to make sure I was ok, which eventually led to my depression getting the best of me and forcing her to move out. Now that I’ve got pointless exposition out the way, I get back to my story. She helps me carry my shopping bags from earlier.

‘I just wanted to know how you’re doing, your call earlier got me a little worried…where do you want me to put these bags?’

I tell her to put them in the kitchen, which she does. She stops and looks around the place, and smells the paint.

'Xavier, what’s that smell?’

‘Nothing, just some paint, I did paintings the other night’ I tell her. All my doors are closed, I don’t want her to see them, I don’t want her to see my world. But she walks towards the bedroom door. And opens the door.

‘Xavier…what the fuck?’

I don’t know what to say to her.

‘Talk to me!’

‘I miss her, Rachel, I miss her.’ I eventually say after a long silence.

‘What the fuck is this?’ She sees all the paintings of my wife, where she has no face, she sees the walls, ceilings, and the floor covered with paint. She’s floating in the air of my new world, a place where she can’t move forward to stop her from regaining any lost memories. I grab the scarf out of the wardrobe and clench it to my heart.

‘What the fuck are you doing? Why have you done this?’

‘This is my home now…I feel safe in this place.’

‘This isn’t a home! This is just paint, you can’t live in these conditions, what’s with you?!’

‘Just go.’

‘I’m not leaving until you come to your fucking senses, you’ve fucking lost it! What is with you?’

‘I’m happy here, I don’t need you people anymore, I’m happy in this place, I have everything I need, my wife is always smiling now, and we don’t need to move forward in time.’

She walks up to my paintings of my wife, and she begins to destroy them one by one, what is she doing? She keeps doing it, why is she doing this? My wife, she’s being destroyed, there was meant to be no pain in this place, I was meant to be free. Every painting she destroys is another car accident in my mind. I fall to my knees.

‘I wanna go home,’ I mutter.

Rachel slowly walks up to me, she pities me as she did at the funeral, why didn’t I stop her? I let her destroy this place. I wanna go home.

‘I’ll take you’, she whispers into my ear. ‘Let it go.’ She tells me. I think of my wife; can I do this? Am I capable of this? I don’t know, I guess there is only one way to find out. I look into my bedroom and see the little black book on the side table.

She puts her arms around me, I let her hold me.