Another Cliché

I had never been an artist. Although I had a huge admiration and appreciation for art in all its forms I would never be anything but below average at it. I couldn’t paint a single straight line, when it came to dancing I was a disgrace to humanity and although I loved words I would never be able to tame them and turn them into stories. No, I was a collector not a creator. When others painted, I saw, and the thing that I saw were more beautiful than you can dream of. Instead of writing I read and instead of speaking I listened, and these words clung on to my soul like seeds that grew into gardens spreading from one end of my body to the other. 

My roll in this life was the interpreter, the one who sees more than exists and lives content with its beauty. Although that wasn’t completely true. I had no need to create, but I did feel a need to make people see and feel the things that I saw and felt. I wanted them to know how beautiful this world could be in a stranger’s eyes, to feel the colours of the world swirling around them in a mishmash of emotions. Everything was there inside of me and all I wanted was for at least a little bit of it to pour out. But I had to be content with seeing, hearing and feeling more than other people did.

There was a place that I liked to go to, a mountain hidden in the city chaos. To get there you had to walk through a small playground with children screaming to their friends and to their mothers, then you turned a right and walked through a green park. If you followed the main track for two minutes and then walked into the trees on your left side, it wouldn’t take long until you could see the mountain. It wasn’t a very large mountain, but it was my favourite place on earth. Up there you had trees all around you and in front of you the river was making its way through the loud city. I liked to sit there and listen to the trees sing and watch the different shades of blue in the river melt together with all the colours of the buildings. 

I was rarely alone there, I often shared the mountain with loud families, lovers and packs of teenagers. Most of them were quite uninteresting, I was always too occupied with sucking in the colours and the sounds of this world to pay any attention to them, until she came along.

It was a blue day, the trees almost seemed tired and needed a break from all their colours so they faded away into the background. But the bright blue sky melted together with the dark river perfectly, so different yet so much alike. You could see bright blue lines where the sun hit the river, turning that day into what I liked to call a “Van Gogh day”. 

   I was sharing the mountain with a family of five, the parents were laughing in the sunshine as they ate their picnic and the children played tag. But it wasn’t just the happy family there, there was someone else there too. 

Far down at the corner at the mountain, someone was hiding in the shade of a tree with a notebook in their hand. I could see the pen touching the paper but no words seemed to fall of it and onto the notebook, the person was simply sitting there completely still with their pen raised. 

The coming weeks, she was always there. Sometimes we were alone and sometimes loud families and friends were sharing our mountain, but she always remained still and quiet. 

   She fascinated me because she seemed so out of place, simply sitting there ready to let the words fall down but they never came to her.

One night I was laid in my bed trying to fall asleep when I suddenly felt more awake than I ever had before. I could hear the colours buzzing above my head and the wind outside my window seemed to call for me. And so I decided to take a walk. Although I never decided where I was going I wasn’t surprised when I found myself on the mountain, what did surprise me was the fact that I was not alone. 

She was sitting in the middle of the mountain with the stars shining on her empty notebook and her head glued to the dark river. Although we had never spoken before I decided to sit down next to her.

In silence we sat there staring at the darkness and the city lights for what seemed like forever until she suddenly opened her mouth.

“What do you see?” She asked me. I remained silent, observing the colours of the world before I responded.

“I see a reflection. I can see the sky with thousands of different shades of dark blue and with stars shining like christmas lights, and I can see its reflection. The river below us almost looks like a piece of the sky that has fallen down and the city lights are miniature stars. It all seems to melt together with each other, our world and the world above us, it’s all just one beautiful canvas.”

We didn’t say more that night, after sitting there in silence for another fifteen minutes, she simply got up and left. I went back to the mountain several times that week but she was nowhere to be found. 

Two weeks had passed since that night and I had started going on nightly visits to the mountain almost every night. I liked to sit there and watch the two worlds melt together into one. One night when I walked to the mountain, she was back. Without hesitating I sat down next to her and let the silence continue.

    We sat there looking at the sky as she suddenly gave me a small painting on a canvas that had been laying at her side. 

The painting was beautiful. The bottom part of the painting was a dark in different shades of blue with bright stars sparkling in it, and above it a city towered. The city was dark but for the bright lights in different colours that shined together with the stars and above the city a dark river seemed to be falling down. The water was pouring down and joining the sky below it without making a single splash.

“Thank you.” She said to me. When I stayed silent, trying to figure out why she was thanking me, she continued.

“I used to paint with colours you could never dream of, I used to write stories more real than this life than we are living, but something happened. I lost someone, and everything went with it. I thought I had grown blind, the colours never come to me anymore and the words are stuck in my throat. But your eyes, they see such beautiful things, and they made me realize that everything that I painted before is nothing compared with what you can see. I have realized that if I don’t ever want to paint something from my own eyes again, because the real beauty lies in the world that you see.”

Silently I reflected upon what she had said, this complete stranger somehow seemed like the most important person in the world. Without really thinking about what I was doing I took her hand, and I never let it go.

Author's Note

I haven't really corrected all my spelling/grammar mistakes yet and I don't feel like doing it right now so you'll have to deal with it.