The Untold Story Sleeping Within The Strokes: Part Three.
{source: Kristi Stout}
It’s interesting how much more you see when your perspective has shifted.
The other ones that would come in to my room, moving boxes and shifting what-nots, they were organizing and turning the senseless chaos into works of art, the paint on Mica and Dawn’s palette drying from cycles of non-use was a stunning design in and of itself, the occasional bird that would fly past the windows was so exciting to me as it was always a surprise!
The puffy things on the great, big, blue canvas at dawn — called the sky!
Despite the gray room I lived in, it was quite a beautiful place. I could see the black and white clearly, and I noticed that when the black and the white reside together, they are a beautiful combination. Why? I asked myself.
What is about the black and the white?
The other ones must have come during the night while I slept, because when I awoke, a lot of the stuff in the room was gone. All that remained was the old box, and the spotlight. It felt good to have the clutter gone.
I casually wondered to myself if I would see my companions this cycle. And I did. I saw Mica. He came in and worked on me but he was alone.
It was light, and Mica’s eyes were in front of me, so close, I could feel the pain and tenderness from his fingers sending tingles across my face. The room was clear; I had words now for what was remaining in the empty spaces.
I gazed into his eyes and his entire emotional spectrum made perfect sense. I was looking at my creator.
He was looking at me as if I was a sacred child. Then stepping back, he allowed his gaze to linger upon my surface, taking every edge of me in. He gently ran his fingers across all the textures of my face with a tenderness of care and colors that filled me with warmth.
What I can explain now is: He stood out as the beautiful painted canvas he was. What I saw, was myself — for the very first time.
He was filled with light — the white: the entire light spectrum in combination.
His eyes had more gold in them than brown today, and he painted on me in vivid spectral colors. I could see what was good in his life. Dawn. But I also could feel his darkness — that violet-black pain. Dawn was not his to have.
But he disregarded this bit of black; he didn’t care, because the white she was making him feel was worth more to him than anything. I heard his thoughts about Dawn.
Said the light in him:
I still have the taste of you on my lips. Soothed by the music we made, illustrated by thoughts of you and moved by our rhythm. I saw how deep I could fall. I want to share with you… forever. I can’t stop thinking about you.
As his thoughts ran away with him, his brush moved across my face with a motion (emotion) I had not known. When he painted on me, it’s as if I became him. I was Mica and I was in love with Dawn.
Said the dark in him:
It’s wrong. She’s married. Watch it! Your head is running away with you. She’s confused and young! She’ll never leave her husband. You are wrong and you are a home-wrecker.
Mica fought with himself as he painted. Black, white, gray. Anger. Passion. Love.
Then he left. My room remained as gray as ever, but my face was a riot of color.
The next time Dawn came to my room, she showed up alone as well. On the times she’d show up alone, she would not paint on me as much as she liked to simply admire me. It was here I could clearly derive that Dawn was a very sad woman.
It was strange to me how in one way people could make each other happy and colorful beyond all reason in the brightest shades of red imaginable or sad in the deepest hues of blue. And how it was possible that it could come from the same source.
That the very thing that created light within someone also lured in the darkness. What a profound paradox.
Behind her initial light was masked a world of darkness.
I could sense that Dawn was experiencing a clash of colors, both towards Mica and with her companion at home — the one she was married to. He was the one that kept her from feeling the truest red with Mica. She wasn’t deciding one way or the other — stuck.
The black and white flashing so hard they turned into gray. Because of this she blended into my gray room like the clutter that used to be there and I could barely see her. But still, she was gorgeous that way.
It was in this moment, I then figured out what it was about black and white.
They constantly oppose, yet always complement in a strange paradoxical dance. They are balanced.
There were many more occasions where Dawn and Mica would come into my room, not to paint me, but to paint each other, with kisses and other such closer affections I cannot describe — because there isn’t a color that exists that would do it justice. I watched them with intrigue.
It was always beautiful to watch them. Closed up in the secret confines of my gray room, they loved so deeply. Then they would love me so deeply afterwards.
But as time cycles went on throughout months, the deep shades of red faded and something a bit sinister began to show its darker face, like the darkness lingering on the edge of the spotlight — it seemed to encroach.
Mica was becoming restless with Dawn’s inability to distinguish her black from her white — she always remained in gray. He wanted her to be one or the other, but to him the gray was this strange state of nothingness. And for a long time neither of them painted on me at all.
My room became the place they’d come to talk about their secrets. The secrets now shared between the two of them. And things were not light like they once were before.
And there was one time I will never forget.
“He found out, Mica.” Dawn started.
“What?! How?” There was a tinge of light and a true smile on Mica’s face. As if Dawn was suddenly free to be the truest red for him.
“He found an email.” The silence between them held whispers of darkness. “I don’t know what to do.” She turned away from Mica, and with hesitancy, said, “He still wants to stay with me, despite this affair.”
And like the night where I experienced the ripping explosion of red hues, there was weighted, fierce darkness that oppressed with a vicious force — all of us in the gray room. Mica had no color in his face. In fact, he was void of color.
After a deathly silence that lasted a long time, he spoke with quiet intensity and in shades of dark-hued blues, like the midnight sky.
“With you…” He paused, staring at the ground. “Everything is so passive.” He spoke firmly, with a vicious glance at Dawn. “I don’t think you’re brave enough to have what you want. In fact, I don’t think you know what you want!” He was angry.
“You carry on with me, yet you go home to him?!” Mica threw his arm in the air, with green passion. “To love me is to die trying! I wouldn’t believe it any other way, Dawn!” He was hurt; there were reds mixed with purples, creating a sick and tired-looking brown.
“This is so ridiculous. What are we doing?”
“Mica, I’m just… scared!” She pleaded. “Right now, I must make this right. My marriage is where I have to focus and until I figure that out, or make it right, I am not free to be with you!” She stopped. And looked at him with a ripping glance. “But can you feel my heart?” It was a whisper.
Mica looked at her with a desperate softness in his eyes that had no color to describe it. I could see a glint of moisture in them. He said nothing.
After this dramatic and dark silence, Dawn spoke again.
“I have to make peace with the fact that just loving you is enough. It’s something of us that I can at least hold on to. That I will love you forever.”
“While you go to back to your husband who blindly takes you for granted, and pushes you — this great friend of yours? How can you do that?! Why can’t you fight? If not for me, then fight for you, Dawn — you first! Because I can’t save you!”
“I am fighting! Fighting within myself for peace!” She yelled, as water broke out of her eyes, and her black and white flashed rapidly into gray. After yet another long silence, Mica spoke with a quiet severity.
“Then I will give it to you.”
And Mica stormed out of the gray room, slamming the door behind him.
I could see the moisture in Dawn’s eyes as she glanced towards me. Oh, if I had arms I would extend them to her, take her into them, comfort her and tell her all would be okay. But I don’t have arms. Just a face.
*****
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Kristi Stout
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