It had been a while since Jayce and I had been thrifting. But with the recent break up, we really needed to spend some time out. Away from the scene of the crime, out of earshot to the ghosts that live within the walls. 

“Look at these paintings.” Jayce almost sounded incredulous as he turned the corner. 

I quickly caught up to my brother, then my eyes fell up on it. There it was, feeling just like me. A dark rock, off to the side, in a colorful meadow. The whole outside world danced with life and color, drenched in sunshine and fresh air. But the dark rock, sits alone. Out of place and forgotten, maybe even considered a nuisance in such a happy place. 

I reached for the painting, but before I could touch it my brother stopped me.  

“Don’t.” Jayce warned softly. “It’s like it’s haunted or something. Maybe even cursed.” 

I laughed at him. “There’s no such thing as curses. Now I have to prove you wrong.” I reached out and pulled it off the hook and took it to the counter. “Can you hold this for me, while we shop?” I asked the attendant. 

She took the painting and slid it into a brown paper bag to protect it behind the counter. 

Jayce studied my face as I walked back to him, he was looking at me as if he was trying to memorize every detail of my face. Burning it into his memory, like one would a loved one going off to war. In case they don’t return. 

“What’s wrong,” I laughed at him, “Stop being foolish. It’s just a painting.” 

“When will you stop playing with fire?” genuine concern was all I could hear, but I would always understand him. He was my twin. 

I reached over off a shelf and picked up some oven mitts, “Perhaps I need some of these too?” 

Jayce’s mood lifted and he smiled. 

The afternoon was short lived, and I returned home to my small, lonely, one bedroom apartment. With the vampire living next door, and the amazon jungle living on the second floor. It’s all I can afford, if I can even afford that now. I can always cut entertainment expenses, the library is free to use. The Y instead of the gym. There’s ways. 

I took down the mirror in the living room and put up my painting. It looks nice, I like it up there. And the light from the ceiling casts just the right shadows on it, and when you turn on the table lamp it lights up the rock and makes it the focus of the painting. And now the meadow, once drenched in life is now forever cast into darkness and shadows. Only the rock, the solid, dark rock, unmovable, unapologetic mattered.  

Night evolved quickly, and I yawned a deep jaw bender knowing work comes in just a few hours. Instead of shuffling off to bed I scooted over and laid down on the couch., looking up at my dark rock. But the normal thoughts I would have wouldn’t form in my head. Instead a sort of silent calm over took me, a boredom I hadn’t felt since the lazy summers of my youth. I thought I should be surprised by the lack of emotion, but instead I just sunk into it like a settling depression. My eyes closed on the nothingness and I joined it. 

I was sitting on my dark rock, but there was no meadow behind me. What there was instead, was a swirling of moving acrylic wet paints, or maybe they were oil. I’m not an artist. It was surreal, like living breathing shades of gray and blue, mixed with heavy dark purples and blacks. And it looked like I could reach out with my hands and touch it and become wet with the paint. 

So I did. 

But I did not become wet with paint. 

My fingertips felt the damp thickness of what my mind registered as a wet paint. But when I looked my fingertips dissolved into the scene. I wanted to react with horror, I pulled my hand back and held it on front of my face. My ring and middle fingertips were no longer on the ends of my fingers. It was if someone had erased them, if they had never existed. And the odd thing was I felt like this, through and through. 

Not shocked, not frightened, not even comforted or accepting. I just felt a blank nothingness. A void of all things. 

I tried to remember a before, if there was a before. But I felt nothing, no history of a past no yearning for a future. 

I looked down at the rock and noticed I was wearing a white sundress with yellow sunflower print. Except it wasn’t, it was white paint with yellow and brown blotches on it, painted to look like prints, accents of green dots for leaves. And it was alive, it was moving like the background. Like a wind was continually blowing over it and the dress was made of chiffon fabric. 

I reached to grab the flowing skirt part with my right hand, but my hand dissolved into the dress and all I pulled back was a nub on the end of my arm. There was nothing from the wrist out any longer. 

And honestly it felt as if should be that way, I could disappear in this painting. I should disappear in this painting. So I stood up, because for me there is no beginning, no end. No forward no backward. No history. No future. 

I walked forward. 

I could feel the paint swirling around me, the dampness like a thick wet mud. I looked down to see the grays had covered up the bottom of my dress. I no longer had legs but stays suspended in the air as if the shadows carried me. 

I felt the painting swallow me whole, at the very last a soft caress on my left cheek of the damp dark mud. Right before all I saw before my eyes grays in a constant movement like water or wind. 

A void of nothingness. The end of calm.