Image credit: Nikolastock

I watch him from my balcony and wish for some suitable epigram, some wondrous words, to sum him up. I would be the Oscar to his Bosey, but without history’s ignominious end. It seems fitting. The art world is not so very different from the literary, and already I am fashioning the doomed love between us and my absolute loyalty to it, even unto the bitterest of ends.

He will be cruel, I think, as all the truly beautiful are cruel – unknowing of the obscenity of their selfishness and forgiven it eternally for the slow steady gaze from eyes under long, lush lashes. He will be inconstant and demanding to the very level that I will be constant and selfless. He will cause me pain but he will be mine and I will be his.

All this I dream and hope, watching this new, wondrous life in my midst. I shall call him Hope, though he will never know, because that is what he has born within me.

I am ready for the pain, I think, finally ready. But I do not know, I cannot even begin to plan, how to bring this morsel into my web.

To go out into the unknown of his life is unthinkable. I cannot even leave the balcony to traverse my apartment to the door, and then the ancient stairway, and then the glittering pavement below. I cannot. I dare not. His rejection is of course inevitable. I cannot kill my dream that quickly. I must be allowed to dream longer, sweeter, even if I cannot make the dream come true.

He can be art at least. He must be art. Because he is my love.

And so I watch him for days, learn his habits, his timing, and conjecture his life around it. He seems alone, he seems to be looking, just as I am, though he is braver, out in the world. Of course he is brave. Everyone loves his beauty. You can see people turning to watch him pass in the street. From my vantage I can see waiters and waitresses alike fawning over him. He seems oblivious to their attentions, locked within himself, a king sure of a kingdom to the point he would not even acknowledge it.

He will have had this affect from his youth, from childhood even. The world would always have been in thrall to him, as was I. So of course he was braver. Of course he could do what I could not. Of course.

I knew I would paint him, once I had observed sufficiently. It was the only way to possess this exotic butterfly, or so I believed. And in a manner of speaking, I was right, though not in the way I had supposed.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved