And so it was.

Our beloved artist. Broken. Miserable. Devoid of creativity and expression. Devoid of feeling. A so-called shell of a man. That was all that remained.

Flo’s death had deeply affected him. The relationship was one of the few remaining authentic things in his life. And God, or the universe, or whatever had taken that away. Just like it had taken his art away. Just like it had taken his family. A deafening lesson in love. They set the things you love free. But that’s just a test. Just a trial of your love. For when you are, maybe, in doubt. But what about when you are sure, when you are certain. Setting those loves free is like rejection. Like abandonment. And here the artist was. Alone. Abandoned. Rejected by the universe. Rejected by himself.

And so it was.

And so what now?

This shell, this automaton. This singleton. It was never much more than going through the motions of each day. Of trying to fit into a mold that was so foreign. But what else could be done? What else could he do?

His loves had evaporated. True, he could seek new loves. But the energy. The attention it would require. The risk. The disappointment. Was the inevitable worth the investment. Not so much of time, but of emotion, of himself. These were the questions each night. Alone, in bed.

He had since washed the sheet he held for that one night. It’s stench of sweat and tears. It’s crusty residue. He didn’t wash it immediately, of course. It took some time. A week at least. To do so felt like abandonment. To admit, to recognize this new era in his life. To step across a threshold from richness, into a vacuum of emptiness, a space with sterile air. He could still breathe, but there was no nourishment in his breath. No awareness of, no gratitude for his remaining breath. How could such a sentiment exist?

His name had been forgotten in the halls of the other artists. The ones who hadn’t experienced what he had. The ones whose stars were still rising, or maybe declining. But there they were. There will still in it. There would be the occasional reference to him. Things like “Remember that one guy...”, “What was his name?”. But the nameless remain in the shadows. The nameless exist in the void. Just their essence would inflict the consciousness of those who were there, in the thick, on the periphery. And still, out of reach, intangible. Like an idea that’s there in your head, but can’t find the words to express. It’s like seeing a shape in the clouds, and then the wind blows, and it’s gone. A richness beaten to a pulp and then crumbs. And you can’t resurrect a slice of bread from crumbs. What’s left is just the impression, the idea, that once there might have been something, there might have been a slice of bread. You might have once used it for nourishment. But now, you can only scrape the crumbs into your hands, or a napkin, or a dust pan, and dump them into the trash. Their value long gone, and long forgotten.

But he didn’t regret it. No. It was acceptance. It was even acceptable. With no expectations, anything can become acceptable. And our artist, loved and tormented as he is, lived in that realm. Sure, he could have reveled in his past. Could have continued to mourn his loves. But to what end, he thought. It would only serve to prolong or emphasize his misery. To highlight the contrast between the before and the after. He was now firmly in the after, the next. Firmly into a new chapter. Firmly into that stage where you transcend your potential, and live in where you are.

And here he was. Where he was. In the now. In the after.

He missed the voice. He wondered when (but not if), it would come back.

***

For anyone else, each day would have seemed a chore. Each day would have seemed a lost opportunity. “Boy, if I’d had your talent...”

But the artist paid no mind.

They didn’t have his talent. More importantly, they hadn’t lived his life. What were they thinking? That they could capitalize on that talent? That they could be high on the hog? He’d already had that experience, and had decided having a patron wasn’t really his jam.

On his way home, the artist would think to himself, amusingly: ”Ha!”

These pedestrians, with their limited understanding of the fascia of art. They didn’t know that to exercise that talent meant something very different from what they expected. In their minds, an artist with talent could create something of genius, and then sell it for a ransom. The whole idea was humorous to him. Quite by definition, an artist could not construct what he had, and handsomely profit from it. Not for very long, anyway. The way such things chipped at your soul. Like the universe was some great sculptor reducing you to dust for such an attitude. It wasn’t sustainable for the greatest artists; for the modest adept at translating expression into some artistic thing. And these mortals, these idiots, these gamblers and financial dreamers, these pedestrians of experience. They thought they could translate their mundane perspective into something great; into something of value.

At times, he wanted to lease his talents to them. Maybe even retain the talents but execute the ideas. But what ideas did they have? How commonplace and obscene were their experiences? What could anyone, much less a talented artist, do with such mediocrity. No. The purpose, the modus operandi of an artist, was to show them something different, maybe something new. Something they hadn’t noticed. Something they weren’t already aware of. Definitely not something common.

What could possibly be the point of expressing something everyone already knew, or was already familiar with?

The artist would sometimes go to bed with such a perspective on his mind. And these thoughts, on such nights, would often excite his dreams. In his slumber, he would experience worlds of everyday people. So many trying to hock their art. And while he never wanted to extract that art from them; he could only see how regular it was. There was no insight. There was no unique perspective. There was no imagination. It was frequently just either: life is great, or life sucks. Blah. Duh. Who doesn’t know that?

So what. So what, indeed. And that was where the artist was. So what. So fucking what.

Blah blah blah and I made a painting. Blah blah blah and I wrote a poem. Blah blah blah and I made a sculpture. And if it wasn’t some pathetic abstract (at this the artist always laughed to himself) expression, it was something dull. And these so-called abstract artists. Give me a fucking break. Here are some squares and circles and triangles and lines. And some colors. And it represents blah blah fucking blah. How did others not laugh at it? How did they muster the constitution to say things like: ”Oh, they way he layered the geometry is astounding!”, “The blues and greens and grays really capture the spirit of the piece”, “The meaning behind these materials is mesmerizing!”. No. No. No. It’s shit. It’s crap. It’s terrible. These so-called artists have no sense of composition, no sense of emotion, no sense of story, no sense of identity. They put a dot or a circle or a filled rectangle and call it something pretentious like “Untitled Number 3”, or “Oscar Wilde in a field of poppies and dreams”. Such bullshit.

And yet, there could be money and success with such entrapments. And those who saw the artist’s talent as something left undeveloped, something they wish they had, looked upon these art as something they could do. They could guess the right lottery numbers, after all, the artist knew all the numbers. And why didn’t he play them? I would play them. I would be a millionaire after playing them.

These attitudes only enraged the artist and enflamed his disdain for such people. “You just don’t get it. You don’t fucking understand!”

There was no savior in him. He wasn’t some artistic messiah. Yet, he could recognize. And these people, these fuckers. (Sigh). These opportunists. There was no place for them in this world. They were the monsters, the defeaters. The thieves. The criminals. The insane. The infirm. The unlicensed. The unabsolved. The weak of mind. The thoughtless. The imitators. The approximate. The uneducated. The un-understanding. The flies. The fleas. The insects. The parasites. Out for their own. Out to gain what they didn’t earn. Out to receive without risking. Without exposing. Without trusting. Without jumping.

***

During the daytime, his obligations mattered. So much that they occupied his time and his mind.

But nighttime. Oh nighttime. Those evil hours. Those tick-tock moments when obligation wanes, when expectations retire. And he was left alone. Alone to himself, and his thoughts.

What is it they say? ”Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

In his bed, with his sheet that had become a talisman. And his mind released. The shackles he held during the day, gone. The oozing of his own thoughts and emotions from behind the constraints he had enabled to get by. They came out. In force. Not one at a time, but altogether. And they came without fear. Without concern for retribution. Without care for judgement. These essential oils of his being, oozing from every crack, every pore.

It felt like exposing the inner garbage of ones self to the world. And, there it was. His garbage. His letting go. Not someone else’s problem to sweep up, but his own accumulation of deadness, of obesity and flatulence, of discoloration, of social anxiety, of abandonment, of isolation. All such familiar and comforting bedfellows.

Oh, he could eliminate them if he wanted. But, again - to what end. It was just himself. It was just his own embarrassment, his own shame, his own coup de grave, if others were in his head. But they weren’t. They were out there, seeing him, judging him, envying him. From their tiny ivory towers. From their comfortable suburban homes. From their Laz-E-Boys, and their leather couches, their fire pits, their deck furniture. With their cigars and glasses of expensive whiskey.

He would think of these things at night. In his bed.

In place of his sheet, he would fondle his belt. The metal D rings, and the strong nylon weaves gave him a sort of comfort. Such designs wouldn’t fail him, if desired to employ their talents.

But, day after day, considering these cheats, day after day considering these outs. He would admire their brilliance, or their ingenuity. But none were ever sufficient. They always fell short. Just like the mundane people he now knew. None were good enough for relationships, and no solution was worthy of his own invention. And so he persisted. He existed. On and on.

Each night a vision of both the next day, and of termination.

That very night, just as he was falling, he heard the voice again: “Oh, my son. You have descended, and ascended. And now you are free.”

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“Free from what?”

“Free from yourself. From the world. You are no longer bound.”

“Bound by what?”

“The world. Life. Your life. You are eternal, my son. You persist through eternity.”

He had so many more questions. “Who are you?”

But there was no response.

***

He would wake up each day with the belt in or near his hands, a reminder of his fate. Whatever that meant. He wished for absolution. But it was never coming. There was no one who could absolve him. It was only within himself, and to absolve himself meant he would have to revisit his nightmares. He would have to slog through the swamp of his emotions. There were no waders high enough to protect him from the water. And to defeat the beasts and demons that dwelled within required skills he didn’t have.

But the nightmares never went away, the swamp always there. They were like a moat around his protected emotional castle. He could only come and go through the gate that overran them. But they were always there. Like ghosts waiting until you fall asleep to haunt you.

It had now been so long since Flo had died. People often say that when someone dies, it takes a piece of them. The artist believed this. But more. It wasn’t just a piece, it was a huge chunk.

He had held several different jobs in that time; none he could hold for long before he either felt too flat to continue or too sad to report in for days at a time. The artist was working at the library for a few weeks, helping restock the returned books. He had always loved the library, but now it was more than that.

The aisles and aisles of books felt to him like trapped stories. Like in that Ghostbusters movie, where they trap the ghosts in a little box. In this case, it was stories trapped on the pages. The artist felt like he could relate to these books. He had his own stories trapped within himself.

And the act of placing them back on the shelves, in their place was almost cathartic. It was a way to lock the stories away, a way to gain control over them. They couldn’t escape and haunt him like his own stories did, but he imagined his stories being put into books and placed on these shelves. He imagined an exorcism that extracted his nightmares and captured them in text. The shelves would hold his nightmares. And the only release of them would be to others. Others would let loose his demons for their own amusement and entertainment. And when they were done, the demons would slither back to their pages, locked away behind hard covers.

The library closed at nine o’clock at night, though his shift went until half past allowing him to restock with less interference from patrons. After his shift, his walk home took him by several art galleries. Most nights, the artist would improve his pace, keeping his eyes forward. He knew they were there, but didn’t want to see them. At a faster pace, with his intense forward stare, he could be beyond them quickly.

This particular night, however, he was lost in thought. He was thinking about a book that he had restocked earlier that day. The book was called The Olive Branch. He thought nothing of it when it appeared on his cart.

However, the moment he picked it up to examine where it should go, something happened. It wasn’t like a physical shock exactly, but in his memory, it had the same essence. It was a moment of electrification - but it reached into his soul rather than his body or his mind. It struck him in a way that he took notice of the book, reading the jacket, and flipping through it.

There’s that notion that Christians can randomly select a page in the bible and find a passage that applies to their current situation. The artist had limited experience with that, but with this book, it felt true. When he first opened it, somewhere in the first quarter of the pages, he read:

“It is with compassion and understanding from whence one must start. A compassion for one’s self is the starting point, and he must extend it to the others around him. Like a positive infection, it must spread throughout his acquaintances, and then to theirs. Through this fractal expansion, compassion encompasses the whole world.”

It was not that he didn’t know compassion. At times he might be in contest for most compassionate in the world. Yet. Yet. Yet. (These were the thoughts in his head).

Yet, this was always to others. He always felt this for those around him. He always put them and their needs first. He was nothing if not compassionate. But only to others.

To himself? He was a demon. A beast. Maybe not even such. Maybe less than that. Maybe just a nothing, a cloud, a numbness. What compassion can there be for a nothing. Nothing has no existence, and therefore can’t be susceptible to compassion.

But there was something about that passage that range a bell inside his soul, and it continued to resonate. He could still hear the frequency in his head. Like a beautiful melody of a single note. And it’s sound was beauty.

That night, the artist went to sleep with that melody in his ears. And he forgot the belt, which slunk at the foot of the bed. The singular melody had taken over. Made itself primary in his mind. He probably could ignore it, but he didn’t really want to. He wanted to hear it. He wanted to sing it.

***

Through most of his life, the artist had run mostly in the same social circles. His friends and colleagues had the same basic values and perspectives on the world. Like any group, they had their differences, but they were slight. Like the peculiarities of different bottled waters. But who gives a fuck? Really, aren’t they all still water?

In so many ways, this history made him strong and sure of himself. In other ways, however, it made him fantastically naive about the piece of the pie he wasn’t entrenched in. He had made some naive assumptions about others being in the realm of his experience, perhaps on the fringes. Yet, he didn’t place them in completely different realms. He knew people were evil, opportunists, bullies, narcissists, addicts, control freaks, and so on. But it had largely been a mental exercise to imagine them, or a slight drifting of an existing archetype into something new.

There were a couple of library patrons who had caught his eye. Through some clever espionage, he was able to learn their names, and their selected reading history. He was particularly interested in who had checked out “The Olive Branch”, as he had an intuition that it was one of the patrons he felt a connection to. And he was right.

Clementine was a relatively plain jane looking woman. She wasn’t exactly young or old. But she had an aura about her. She always wore a long dress when she visited the library. This seemed to exclaim something about her old soul. Her slim glasses suggested something more than just near- or far- sightedness. Her well coiffed, but simple hair also portrayed a person of simplicity, or closer to earth-ness.

His first attempt at flattery was to walk by her with “The Olive Tree” in his hand. He thought if she saw him with the book, she might say something. It was a silly and stupid move he told himself later. She did not notice at all.

His next move was to manipulate his restock plan to coincide with her browsing. This would place him in close proximity for some extended period of time. Maybe five or ten minutes. He didn’t have a plan for his next step. To make eye contact would be enough; though he had hoped for a brief conversation.

His luck turned positive. He had noticed that she had a habit of always checking the true-crime section. There were only a few true-crime selections on his cart, but he felt it was enough to give it a shot.

He allowed her to approach the shelves first. She was scanning a variety of titles about the mob, a few about serial killers. He took a brief inventory of his restock work. There were no mob books. There was one book about Ed Gein, which he selected from the cart. He approached her with the book in his hand, scanning the shelves for the proper location.

She had glanced at him once or twice, given his general proximity. As he found the empty slot where the book belonged, he begged her pardon, and leaned in to place it on the shelf. He looked at her as he retreated to his cart. She gave him a slight smile. Curiously, she grabbed straight for the Ed Gein book.

In a slight misunderstanding of his job, she asked him if he’d read it.

“No... I’m just here to restock the returns.”

“Oh. Hm.”, she replied.

He did his best to smile at her. But the attempt embarrassed him, and his face turned red.

She spoke up: ”I didn’t mean ... uhm ... “.

“No. It’s ok. Sorry about that, it’s just ...”

And the awkward silence followed.

“I mean, I find him interesting ... Gein. What would drive a man to such ... uh ... things?”

She retorted: ”Careful... maybe I’ll make a skin suit out of you...”

This statement stunned the artist. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. But then her serious affect melted into a smile and slight laughter.

And that was how it began. Soon there were drinks, and conversation. Soon there was kissing and seduction. Soon there were all the things that naturally lead to relationship. The artist’s reluctant nature had been overcome by the olive branch she had extended.

Her compassion was overwhelming to him. He felt it was a lesson he could learn from her. How could she master her emotions so well, so easily, so effortlessly. It felt like it was a natural extension of her personality.

It wasn’t long before they moved in together. It would be the first time he had ever cohabitated with a lover. But it felt right. Sidney, that was her name, had felt like a natural companion from the beginning. Something about her had disarmed him, pulled him into her world, and made him feel comfortable.

When they went out, she would play the lead socially. She seemed to know everyone. Although the artist felt a bit out of his element at times, he enjoyed feeling like he was part of a social environment.

Remember how, in the movie Ghostbusters, they captured all the ghosts and stored them in some tank or containment contraption? And remember how, when the city officials came in and shut down the operation? That’s basically what happened next.

Sidney had been living with the artist for several months now. Most months, she provided a share of the rent. She didn’t really work, but had a small trust from her family she was living off of. It allowed her to continue surfing through life without making a commitment to anything. Still, though - she was so compassionate toward him. Still, he was trying to learn from that.

The trust continued to build. It was about five months when the artist came home... on the day that the rent was due. Sidney hadn’t offered her share yet. He walked into their place.... and immediately he knew. It wasn’t just her stuff that was gone. It was that plus many of his things. There were four or five paintings he had started, mostly done. Gone. Completely.

He tried calling her. No answer. He went to her previous place, no one there.

There were a few regular places they went to, the library, and a few places he knew her friends liked. All were failures. She wasn’t anywhere. They hadn’t seen her. She had disappeared, like a ghost. Nothing left but the intuition that she had been there, just a moment ago.

And that night, in his room, on his bed. The covers were close. The feeling was like falling from a cloud in the sky to the hard surface of the earth. But he didn’t feel the hit. He only felt the after-effect. Which was his mood. His self in his bed. He wanted to pull the sheet up. He wanted to pull the belt up. But everything was off the bed...

And he fell asleep, the belt out of reach, but well within his mind...

***

The following week, the artist purchased a sketch pad. He reasoned that he might be able to reignite his former passion if he only applied himself. That forever shaming phrase: ”If you would just apply yourself!”

He sat upright in his bed with the sketch pad in his lap. The slim pencil in his hand felt familiar and comforting. The blank page - the land of discovery, the place were his soul could spill out.

As he stared at the page, it seemed incongruous with his current state of mind. He hadn’t been in this moment for a while. The page stared back, challenging him, asking him what it was he felt. Telling him it would continue to be a blank page until he felt something, until he took action.

He had just recently changed up his look a bit. His hair was now a sandy blond, shaggy but not too long. He wore it a bit messy in his nonchalant, I-don’t-give-a-fuck style. He could see a reflection of it in his bedroom window. He could see himself, the way his bland and empty look had no inspiration. The scattered locks falling across his forehead. He was trying to look into his own eyes to see what might be behind them. But it was nothing. Nothing at all.

He placed the sketch pad on the bed, got up, and walked to the window. He opened it to feel the outside air. From his pocket, he drew his pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He placed the butt of the cigarette between his teeth to steady it, and lit it. He drew in the smoke, holding it in his lungs for a moment before releasing it into the outside world.

He watched the smoke rise up into the sky. It’s stochastic flurries and eddies amused him. His eyes continued upwards to the clouds. He was reminded how, as a child, he had studied them. Finding all manner of images. Dragons and other animals. Hearts and trees. The nostalgia reminded him of the early roots of his creativity, his need to express himself. He remembered how, after seeing something obvious, like a turtle, he would continue to watch the cloud, watch it evolve. What was a turtle was now an airplane. What was an airplane was now a rocket. The rocket was now a cross. Maybe it was the cross, he had once wondered to himself. A sign from God. But then the cross would slip into a dagger, then a sword, and then it would thin and float away into nothing.

Now he saw this as a metaphor for his life. He had changed, evolved. From one thing, to another, and then another. And now, he was floating away. Thin. Into nothing.

As his cigarette expired, he shuttered the window and walked back to the bed. He picked up the sketch pad, again staring at the blank page. And thought to himself, the sketch is complete. He is thin. He is nothing. The page was his mirror.