Blank walls and Watercolors

The day she left, she pressed a little picture into my hands. Hands which wanted to hold on to her. But these very hands decided to let her go. For she was the wind; you couldn't ask her to stay. She would go where she wished, whistling her song.

I had seen her walls covered with photographs. Of places she had been to and of places she wanted to go. Of people she had loved and left and held onto. Of things which stole her heart.

Photographs and polaroids and paintings. Everything that could sum her up, filled her bare walls. Everywhere you turned, you looked into a world. A piece of the universe inside her.

So, when she left me that picture, I wasn't really surprised. It was what she really was. Inside, deep within, this was all she was.

The picture she left me was everything and nothing. It was as if her world had folded itself over and over and over until it was small enough to fit right in, in my drawer.

I kept it close. Under my pillow. Near the vintage lamp which stained my walls with antique silhouettes. I thought of framing it and putting it up on the wall where anyone and everyone could see it. Maybe, it could be the first thing that people saw when they walked in. And maybe, they would be surprised and would ask me, "Why do you have this picture here? It's nothing!"

But I would step aside and correct them, "No, it isn't nothing. If you look at it the way I do, it would feel like going into battle and not knowing what you are fighting for. It would feel like taking that last step from the edge where you had so long been standing; contemplating. It would feel like that last fall. It would feel like peace. It feels like peace and yet, it will be chaotic. You'll want to draw your own blood to make up for the emptiness.

For it might just be a blank white wall in the picture, but the person who lived within them was a canvas and she had filled herself with the hues of the best and the worst of the world she had seen. Maybe, it isn't anything. But it is what she really was. She was only a blank wall and that was what was most beautiful about her."

Images: pixabay