Image credit: Zwiebackesser

I wonder, as I paint, if the story of the Fall is actually the story of god and not an errant angel. Could it be that profound disappointment makes you resent the boundaries you place around yourself, and if you are indeed a god, how can you be anything, truly, but boundless?

Perhaps God, weeping for the willfulness of humankind, split apart and sent his own despair and disappointment and rage as Lucifer, and thereafter that has been the Fall, the splitting apart of a once whole god. I could understand that, I could empathise if so. For this is how I felt now, split apart, boundless, only curious in some detached, bleak way about how far I might go.

Forcing Richard by my painting was too far, even for me, and in any case, my rage was not to him. It could never be to him, for I loved him so simply, so perfectly. Thus Lucifer had to split from God to do his damage to humanity. God could not have done that from such profound love within. And neither can I.

But part of me fell, split apart, given birth by my brush and my paint. And my hatred fell on the shoulders of a different one, the one who had stolen my love, the one who had made my beloved so deeply and unknowingly betray me.

I paint her very deliberately. And her form is perfect. Richard had many photos of her, in fact, and from these I gleaned every precise detail required. I painted her running, rushing to her lover, across the street from my home, across to the café, laughing with joy to be with my beloved. My beloved.

But just as she is crossing, she does not look, does not look in time, and she is hit, sudden, complete and fatally, by a speeding car. I paint death in the pain and the impact, and on my beloved’s sweet face a strange mixture of joy and horror, caught in the split moment of the painting. The moment he realizes she is gone, just as she is leaving, just as the soul departs.

It is perhaps my greatest work artistically, the nuance of that precise moment caught so perfectly. It is a shame I can never show this, and I know I never can. Like so many of my god-strewn work of late, it is a private affair. It is my equivalent of Dorian Grey’s portrait in the attic, the proof of my mastery over life that only I can see lest it is taken from me forever.

And it is also proof of my mastery over death.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved