Modern Romanticism

He asked himself this question a hundred times. When he asked it, again, it wasn’t with any greater wonderment than when he asked it after the fiftieth time. This question, being, “Have I done the correct thing?” struggled to be given an answer. There had been no one else, besides himself, to hear these words being spoken.

A man who might be just three or four years, or perhaps a bit older, past his twentieth year of life stands in a room with a common design of having four corners. Four corners, as this design depicts itself, especially with regard to this man’s question, with likeness to a prison. As confusion resides within the meaning to these words and to them lacking an answer, he finds himself without wanted escape. In both the literal and the figurative, he does not seek a way out.

Is it something we can determine of him, that he doesn’t need a way out?

Before this man, a canvas on a easel rests. He has, with a bucket full of black paint, blanketed all the white of that canvas with the same shades that surround his standing body.

All around him, shadows are seated in what should be easily described as bleachers that have been placed up against all four of this room’s four walls. They watch him. They are kept in suspense of this man’s actions. This man acts as the central figure inside a stadium for the stunts and maneuvers of someone buried in darkness.

So much in darkness, though a faint gleam of light enters in through a single window that’s before the man and behind the easel. Venetian blinds, upon that window, have been situated to only allow that slight trickle of light to invade upon the back of the easel.

But as we refer to darkness, as we speak of this room, and as we speak of the canvas painted only black, how do we come to speak of this man, the painter?

By what the faint glow of light from the window does to this room, we can just barely glimpse the residue of tears that have left semi-dried stains on this man’s cheeks. These stains are, of course, in the shape of long trails. What memories are leaking out from his eyes, along with those tears? What does he recall or relive, among all emotion that a man cannot any longer contain?

Black canvas, once white. Dark room, once with light spreading to all four corners. A depression to this man’s soul, once dressed in the layers of innocence in a childhood that was veiled from life’s trials.

A beautiful enigma, and one, in the form of a man, who spared himself from wedding with the darkness, in its entirety. Emotion floods from his spirit to be soothed at his hand having lifted a paintbrush. Strokes of black did not erase, though had prolonged his life for a precious few more minutes. What would he have done, had he not done this? Would he have surrendered his life into every aforementioned example of darkness?

It was less hideous, more beautiful, to spare his own life in this expression of weighing emotions. It was all beautiful to live longer, to not simply stare at that blank canvas and become what it is.