Spots of Blue

There was a man, sad and grotesque, who submerged himself with beauty only to denounce its true ugliness in an invention to love more deeply. He was also just a student in his youth, one whom many would consider lovely.

In his hands was a reproduction of a tropical landscape; at the center stood a Polynesian Eve picking fruit from a tree. His friend, in a letter accompanying the print, had written extensively on the idyllic subject, but the man’s attention kept drifting to another figure. On the bottom left crouched an elderly woman, knees tucked together and palms pressed against her face, seemingly lost in a vision of death. 

He stared at this painting in a rocking chair he’d recently acquired, limbs aching after being stuck in the same position for hours. During that time, this man who signed his papers “Y” glanced towards towards the world only once. Now tottering past the shutters, Y uncovered a drawing he’d started and stopped some months ago. His thoughts kept floundering as he stared at the sketch, his fingers itching to fling the offense through the air. 

Grabbing a blank canvas, he hobbled back to his chair, knocking over a cold cup of coffee. Moaning a litany of curses to himself as he reached for a cloth, he suddenly noticed a boy through the window, standing in the middle of a busy street below. 

The boy acted like a holy fool, waving to whomever passed by with an inordinately joyful motion, receiving stiff yet polite nods that filled Y with irrational anger. Eventually, he walked to an empty corner —Y could not have witnessed this next part erroneously— and began skipping in a circle. These skips turned into spins, and soon enough, the boy was dancing. He continued on for a stupefying amount of time, as though discerning classical melodies in the surrounding construction. Y would have been greatly unsettled if not for the boy’s subtlety that contrasted his earlier waves— his dancing was contained so as to not hit passerby, but open enough that it appeared as though he were embracing a partner. 

Moving closer to Y’s building, the boy suddenly turned his whole body and stopped. Y dropped his pencil in surprise. The boy was not a boy but a very old man, with such a wrinkled face that it could be seen from five stories above. In Y’s shock, he did not register when the man disappeared from his sight. But his hand had already found the canvas and was beginning to move on its own. 

When Y finally came to his senses, he had painted the man. No more than a little oblong of blue amidst streaks and splatters of city dwellers, an underpainting that left the eye no doubt as to the fact that the colors were of real paint that came from pots and tubes. 

Night had fallen when Y sunk back into his rocking chair. This was the chair that he worried in for hours on end, but he found it uncomfortable then. This realization startled him, so much that he stood up and glared at the chair like it had committed a grave sin. Shifting towards the side, Y noticed on his cabinet the print he’d been studying earlier—Paul Gaugin’s “Where Do We Come From?” He turned it over a few times, his thumb grazing the image of the dying woman before settling on the figure at the center. A calm breeze entered the room during his pause and he followed it onto the balcony. Peering out into the night, he saw one, and then another, innumerable spots of blue.