Faded curtains of white lace block the rising sun, so it would seem. Streaming rivers of wet, glitter-orange light decorate the room, dancing in their stillness.

It was a room of modest dimension, ideal for one to sleep by themself – as this boy now does. Passionate adornments of paint, spattered by dead brilliance, cling to the rigid stucco walls. The walls were sharp, jagged. The boy was careful as he slept, as not to brush against the serrated plaster and awake in a bloody mess.

In contrast, the floor was still and smooth. Cool, dusty tile, a pallid shade of grey, lines the flat planes of the floor. The morning sun, however, awakens its dull pattern.

The small, rectangular bed is pushed into a far corner, as if hiding from the stark light which floods the room‰s sleeping atmosphere into awakening. The dusty sheets are stiff with dried tears, and thick fluids of love now lost.

The boy was happy once. Naturally lackadaisical, he was the type to wander through life, childlike, stopping only to touch whatever caught his fancy. Seventeen years after stumbling into the clouded haze of his life, he met who he came to think of as the Wind. She was a beautiful girl, both cunning and demure. She fell in love with his wheat colored hair, his gold-flecked eyes. She adored the brilliance, the energy, which bound him tightly in its aura. Bound him infinitely in his jaded world of hope and wet, brightly-colored paint.

He was equally enchanted by her strength and striking physique. The prior, a subtle, yet enveloping mist that devoured the boy whole. He would sometimes think, while gazing into her eyes, or caressing her silky hair, “I can feel her in my guts.”

And so he did. And she swam in it. They preyed upon each other for quite some time, in a carnivorous pursuit of lust and flesh; of love too soon to be requited. He painted pictures of her, dancing in the wind, and rustling in the trees.

But as it is with every child, innocence is lost and it was his which she stole. Robbed merciless after a final carnal dance. Of passion, and the precedent of sorrow, it was a lecherous act of closure, unbeknownst to the boy. Afterwards, asleep they fell, under the summer moon’s milk. She waited by his side until his passing of consciousness, and drifted away. Without remorse or guilt, she was forever gone. Apathy kissed words of mock regret stained the torn paper that she placed underneath his sleeping head. The paper’s listless words of sorrow and apology waited anxiously for the boy’s conscious thoughts to return from their last seraphim moments. To shatter them whole.

When he woke, he was broken. Fell into an icy pond of devastation, and began the painstaking process of drowning alive. Steeped in tears that begun at the mere sight of her absence, he transcended into a blistering abyss of prolonged agony; consuming sadness at the loss, and the scalding anger of hatred and jealousy. Hatred and jealousy to the victor of the battle of which he knew not. To he who had the power to hold the wind, complacent, in his hands.

Thus, he began his new life. He became cold and bitter, consumed – yet detached from the light he emanated in the past. Unable to touch it or see it, for it was upon this inner passion and feeling which he thrived, the boy began to dissipate. He found solace in sleep, although it no longer provided him with the blinding, ecstatic visions that it did in the past. But it was a lull, a brief pause from the deafening silence that now haunted him like a deceitful phantom.

He continued to paint, but his images no longer possessed the shimmering aesthetic which glorified them – in the past. Colors became stagnant and burnt. Texture lost its grace. “I can feel her in my guts,” he had still thought.

He had awoken to this day, just as on any other. Lace bathing in orange light dripped wistfully from the window. A January winter morning where the heat inside raged against the outside‰s cold, creating a subtle shiver in the air.

The boy sat up and looked around. Brushing wisps of his hair from his eyes with delicately boned fingers and smooth nails the color of glass. He watched intently a an unfamiliar feeling crept over him.

The bruising awareness of inspiration percolated through his collective awareness, taunting cries resonated from the filth in which the sterile, white canvases that were strewn throughout his room were steeped. The tears that habitually glistened on his face upon waking were cleansing, rather than tears of anguish – as such crystalline secretions usually are.

Poised, as if balancing precariously upon a razor sharp tight-rope, he rose from his content haven of sleep. Movements, like gliding on blue ice, brought him to the center of his room. There lied a stand. A mahogany stand upon which rested a delicately placed canvas, the color of snow. A canvas which had stood clean and barren for several months in a vain attempt at forgotten memory. Its size, and sheer magnitude, outweighed that of the surrounding canvases. Blinding white, and refracting throughout the room, the boy knew, and admitted to himself with calm resolve, what he had to do.

His palette, a deadly curvaceous blade, bore not many colors. He held it in his left hand, as his right was needed for more important tasks. He raised his gold flecked eyes to the ivory white surface which lay perpetually before him. He paused, breathing heavily, to dip his brush into the supple, watery consistency of the paint. He indulgently skimmed the brush across the surface, giving life to thick strips of color.

A shocking jolt of nausea sent him careening into a blistering memory. Sharp nails of sophisticated points dug deep into his scalp, silken fingers weaved through the wheat of his hair. “I love you,” were the words crooned into his ear. Once crooned into his ear.

He was startled from his reverie sharply, like a puncture. That as if a nail, forcefully pelted into his flesh. He continued with his paint.

Color on white. A portrait of a girl. Long, satiny tresses of copper-toned brown hair stained the canvas. It was the backdrop of the subject, as her hair, in the portrait, would be pushed back from her face, (as he had often loved to do).

Delicate, painstaking brushes found their way onto the surface. Trance-like, he was completely focused. On the paint, and the devastating memories that accompanied them – propelling him to create. Create as he no longer thought he could do.

He finished her eyes, all the while drowning in the gaping black pupils of nostalgia. His peripheral vision sharpened to a needle point. Staring at the sick, one dimensional recreation of those cinnamon eyes, he saw her dance. Another blinding flash of regression. For the cinnamon eyes no longer sparkled in the sun, as they did when she would dance. “I can feel her in my guts,” he thought. Yet he still thought.

This portrait cast a shadow. It added false dimension to her face. Its elegant contours and carefully sculpted bones possessed a hollow glow – colored auburn, as if they were spots of skin untouched by a blackened sun. He used a scalpel to hatch thin, structural lines – they gave rebirth to the planes of her face, and yet were invisible to the untrained eye.

The boy stood back, clutching tightly, and unknowingly, to his scalpel – marveling at what lay in the works before him. A shuddering spasm swept through his entire body. His knees buckled, and crippling seeds of nausea, several hours planted, continued their rapid gestation.

He gathered his determination and set back to work, dipping and stabbing the brush into his paint. He continued with mad strokes and dips, wallowing in his calm delerium flowing over him in waves.

The bottom of the image extended just slightly below her neck. The crevices of her collarbone possessed auburn depth, equal to those darkening her face. A thin, clasped necklace added further to her elegance as he painted.

Sharp, exquisitely defined lines made the chain, and the jewel, the burnt red of garnet – the stone of her birth – dangled daintily from it. It became a jewel of malice, charred and gleaming with an ill glaze.He grew wearier as he pushed himself forward with his work.

Tears like strings of glass ran down his face. He jolted backwards once again, remembering. How lovingly he had fastened that a gem at the base of her throat. Her dewy skin iced with anticipation, her healthy glow magnified at the gesture. He drew back from his mind’s poisoned clutches.

Crazed inspiration beat him mercilessly. He held that memory, and projected it onto the painting. He fearlessly stabbed the brush into the paint. Her face became dusted with an angelic glow, innocent and sensuous. With the tip of his brush, her chiseled cheekbones took on their characteristic blush–that of rusted wine.

The boy bathed in dizziness as the face upon the canvas bathed in color. Nerve tremors swam through him, through his skin and into his bones like a virus. He knew not yet of weakness, but of desperation. But his resolve ran deeper than his pain.

He set back to work between broken, choking sobs. His vision blurred, catching only glimpses of sight through his gauze of tears and tenuous grasp on consciousness.

Her lips lay barren. Memory painted a dream of the countless times he had kissed those lips, lips so crimson red.

He sought completion, and plunged the point of the brush again into the paint. Full lips, with a naturally coy pout took form. They complimented dazzingly when finished, with the rest of the portrait. First copper brown, then cinnamon, then auburn, finished with hues of wine and rust. The lips were still wet on the canvas, painted almost thickly enough to drip. Like shiny liquid red wax.

The finished painting stood tall in the room’s center. The boy looked just long enough to capture a frozen image of it, and collpse onto the floor. “I can feel her in my guts,” he thought serenely, as he irrevocably passed consciousness.

He lay on his back now, razored metal palette still in hand, clean, save for the clotting red paint which stuck to its sharp edges. The scalpel he used to paint the more angular parts lay on the floor, coated so thick with red substance that its surgical gleam could no longer be seen. And in the other limp, rigid hand remained the brush, bristles stiff and filthy with blood never to be cleaned.

The pallid grey tiles of the floor puddled with scarlet. The paint of the boy’s life, seeping fatally from his stabbed open stomach, ebbed in its flow, only ceasing with his life.

Lace curtains bathed in the moon’s milk. The walls were slick with malaise, as the floor was with blood. Stars outside shone brightly, dancing in their stillness.