Stain

I gaze at the canvas; clean, white, new. I imagine the colours that will fill its vast emptiness, line it from end to end, top to bottom, and the textures that my painting knife will create and enhance. I think of bright yellows, happy oranges and fiery reds as I gather my brushes, bring out an old palette and remove the covers from the paints. There is anticipation in my deft movements and a beauty that can be seen only in my mind; one that will be translated onto this canvas, soon.

I close my eyes for a moment, to capture, to affix the forms and hues in memory, but instead, I remember the way the rain had fallen, the day we first met...that day in August, with its defeated, grey skies and crystal tears. I hadn’t seen you then, yet I had conjured your image in thought, defined it in my imagination. I had painted the rainbow-arched bridges that we built so fast between us, and textured the crumbling walls between two people locked within themselves for a long time. I used a lime yellow to tell of the freshness in our friendship, your favourite colour, and complemented it with the palest pink, for me.

I lift my brush to the whiteness now, but the bright colours I have chosen seem to dissolve into murky browns and pallid greys; colours of irrevocable change, of inevitable endings. I blink, once, twice, in the light, but the hues continue to deceive. But I go on, stroke after stroke, slathering the creamy paints onto the stark, white canvas, altering its appearance forever.

I step back to take in the collective tone. My knife has carved jagged patterns in the thick hues of an evening sky, mingling swirls of yellow with vast quantities of red, the colour of passion, the colour of beginnings. An orange sun sinks into a violet sea, its bed, the colour of pearls. I realize I am no longer wistful over doomed, silver friendships and their fragile, gossamer memories. I have honoured, preserved what remains, in a place where colours do not bleed and salt water cannot corrode or wash away...

There’s just one last thing to do. I have saved a little puddle of pink on the palette for last. The colours clash, but I still dip a determined, fine brush into it, and sign my name in simple, unassuming curls at the bottom of my dream.