Rielleee

     He glanced at the photo of the deceased, if by mere curiosity. It'd been a wake, he realised. He stood staring, starstruck at the photo. It seemed lifeless to his painter's eye, it cost him another sigh  ‘A young lady’, he thought to himself. ‘Whoa, she's young. That's a shame. Wait,’ he paused upon reading her date of birth. ‘We're the same age. Man, so am I old or young?’

        Clicking his tongue, he turned around, head down as he tried to squeeze past the packs of people coming in. Stepping on petals of peony flowers on the floor, all around surrounded with pink flowers. ‘There's so many people here. She must've been loved by many, and loved greatly. Maybe even truly. She looked like an angel.’

        He let out another sigh, the skies grey, everything around him differently shaded grey and blue or none at all. People he passed by, bumped into and walked with. Finally he reached the small plot of land where his estranged father was about to be buried.

         Even while surrounded by relatives he hadn't seen in a decade, the world around him still looked colorless, dreary. He watched his half-siblings and his father's widow watch him from the corner of his eyes. Although the relationship was strained, he felt he still had to go. The man was still his father regardless. 

        It was a quick and somber affair, cold, quiet. Much like the man his father had beenPeHe refused to throw dirt on the casket and only watched it be buried, like sin in the heart. As soon as his father had been put to rest, Keigo turned as if to flee only to be barred by his father's widow.

        He'd been dragged back to his childhood home, much to his disdain and yet most die to his own acquiesce to keep the peace. “Well, your father left some things.” She said, clearing her throat. Gel nails tearing an envelope apart. 

       ‘Oh, I thought there must've been something…’

       “You brought me here for that? Forget it.” He declared as he stood from the dirty white couch he fondly remembered. The widow scowled, nails digging into his skin to make him sit, like she'd done when he was a teen. She disliked it too, at the possibility that he would have been left with something. Even scarce, when she and her children had already been left so little. “You're that man's eldest son. Who knows, maybe he left you something.”

        “He's not a sentimental man.”

      In the end, after the will had been read, Keigo received nothing but an old fashioned gold ring. Tacky as it was. His half siblings getting the house and car. He pocketed it, feeling it's heavy weight on his pocket… in his mind. His skin felt pricked standing in the house he was raised in, nauseous even. 

       Finally, and in silence he once again got up to leave the suffocating home. He gave the living room that didn't seem familiar at all a once over, hazel eyes eyeing the peeling wallpapers. Still, as he walked out the door he heard his father's children mocking him, his name. 

       “Maybe you'll grow wings, at least your name sake was great. But you-” He'd stopped listening by then, letting the door hit him on the way out. He sat in his car, hands on the wheel of the unmoving vehicle, parked in a neighborhood he wanted to leave in the past. “Being named after an anime character of all things. What was my mother thinking?”

      He despised it, since he'd look at the characters story and realised aside from his dirty blonde hair and hazel eyes, he was nothing like the accomplished character. Perhaps, they were only similar in losing the ability to soar through the skies. His with the loss of wings and him with the loss of his spark.

       His phone dinged again, the uber logo popping vibrant green. Once, twice, again and again until he got fed up and threw it to the back seat. “I'm not working today!” He yelled as if the app could hear his frustration. He sat in his car for hours, sitting, sitting, sitting.

        “What now…” He muttered to himself. He looked across the street, his best friend's house. The same man now living a happy life, an accountant. A wife. “Two kids last I heard, and me…” He cursed, crisp. “What am I going to do now?” He'd often spoken to himself, tonight was no different.

         “Twenty-seven… by now I thought I'd be the greatest painter ever lived. Picasso or some-” A stream of curses once again as he remembered his unfulfilled dream. “What happened? I don't understand… Everything was on track. I can't believe I'm living in a basement..” His hands gripped the wheels as he started the car.

        Driving an Uber seemed better to him, or so he reasoned to himself not wanting to admit he avoided heavy labour that might damage his hands in case his passion ever returned to pick up the brush again. Even if it starved him and left him on the streets, shivering.

       “I was talented..” He shook his head as he pulled out of the old road. Everyone praised him, his artwork pinned to the fridge, displayed at school. Even making the paper, but that's as far as it went. “Even got into a good art university on scholarship, that good…” He continued as if he were talking to someone. An imaginary passenger.

       “Then, I just lost it. I don't remember when, why even. I just couldn't paint for crap anymore. It felt like burning out and I was dropped from the program. Now.. I drive a second hand car from a second hand scammer, what am I going to be now? Forget Picasso, I'll never be remembered by anyone-” He'd been too into his wallowing self-pity to notice two high school sweethearts crossing the street.

      He yelled out a curse, turning the wheel, braking too late. He narrowly avoided them.

         He collapsed in the park, after yelling at the precocious teens. Sitting on the park bench, he lay down. Hood up, his fingers tracing his inheritance as he shivered, watching the moonlight dance on the man made lake. 

       “You know, you can't sleep here right?” A sweet voice asked him. He jolted up, surprised and wincing from seat belt bruises. His eyes took time to adjust, there was a young lady standing in front of him. The orange light from the unmaintained ‘maintained’ lamplight had eyes squinting.

       ‘This woman…Seems strangely familiar, have I seen her before?’ 

       He shivered at the feeling of deja vu as he studied her. Hair dyed pink, not the bright hot pink that hurt his eyes, the kind of pink like white with a touch of pink like cherry blossoms in spring, glimmering and soft, catching the light like spun pearl. ‘I look pale in comparison..’ He thought to himself as he gaped. After her though, every watered down colour came springing back to life. Eyes like crystal amethysts, pure, clear and shining brightly reflecting light like fragments of mirrors in an art room it reminded him in that brief moment of a sanctuary he had once ran to for refuge simply because his mother had given him no shelter, the broken shards of stained glass windows. 

      “Are you an angel?”

      Her eyes crinkled up like crescent moons as her smile turned into sweet peals of laughter that rang in his ears, and it tickled him in a way. She seemed to shine, like an angel. Tilting her head to the side, she mused, "I don't think I'm an angel though, but thank you.”

       “Oh…w..what's your name then?” He asked as he sat up properly, scooting to the farthest side as if to leave all other space to her. “Secret.” She said, in a way that seemed like singing as she sat beside him. “Hey, do you know what Euphemia means?” She asked him as she drew her legs up, resting the heels of her shoes on the edge of the seat. She was wearing baby blue coloured shoes, he noticed.

       He answered, briefly. “Well spoken.” Then, added, “You sure are.” He heard her hum. “I prefer the derived ones. Good omen. Good fame. I'll be yours if you let me.”

     ‘What a strange woman.’

          She piped up again, something lively and cheerful in the way she spoke. “Why do you look so gloomy?” Perhaps it's because he almost died or it was getting to him that his father died, he found himself opening up easily. About his life, his dreams. The lost spark and passion. She felt strangely reassuring.

     “Maybe you just need a muse? I could be your muse. I'm pretty enough, right?” She said with a grin, swinging slightly forward to show him her beaming smile, pink hair cascading down her shoulders.

      He thinks, ‘Not pretty enough. Too much.’

    “It's not about being pretty.” His answer came out blunt, more than he meant to. Pouting, she complained, “So you're saying I'm not?” 

      “That's not what I meant-” “I'm kidding, you're way too rattled.” She said with a teasing laugh as she continued to chatter like a bird. “Well, I've always wanted to be an artist's muse, you know? I can't explain it but, I mean, you know? The kind of beauty you have to be to inspire art.. the, um… the.. ah, you get it! Just, to be a masterpiece that lives forever, what I wouldn't give for that.”

      He nodded, her words cutting into his ribs. His heart thumping harder than it's ever, the tips of his fingers cold. The same feeling he got when he wanted to paint something before.

        “So..” He began hesitantly, “Well, will you be my muse?”

        “Oh?” She laughs. “That sounds like a marriage proposal-” “That's- nevermind.”

          She grinned and reached for his cold hands, hers warming his clammy palms and frozen fingers. “No, wait, I was only teasing you. Here's my answer, Will I? Of course! Sure, sure, sure!” She stood up, energetically like a kid given a candy with the brightest, most beautiful smile he'd ever beheld. “How do I pose?” She said, posing like Emilia Clark. Silly, cute. “Like this? Should I sit? Oh, wait, my hair is all over the place.”

       “Just be you.”

        “What?”

   “You heard me. How do you imagine you look immortalised, just, do that.” She simply smiles in response, sits and looks at him. “Okay.”

     And so, he painted her. His hands once again holding a brush, his eyes seeing colours popping again. As he did so, feeling something warm in his heart again, something mending. Something coming back to life. 

        “Tell me your name when we meet. Oh, by the way, my favorite flowers are meconopsis. You know, the blue flowers?” She said as she sat, looking at him as brush strokes came to form. He hummed, nodding his head just barely. A thought in his head as he realised he might not be able to paint her beauty justice. The warmth. The greatness.

        ‘Instead of being a painter, I wish I'd been a poet so I could've been able to string up the right words to express how she makes me feel.’

        When he reached her hands, it felt incomplete so, he rose, legs wobbly from the long time of sitting and kneeled in front of her as he pulled the gauche, golden ring from his pocket. “Wear this.”

       “You know, that's such a bland way of asking me to marry you right?” She teased him again but let him slip the ring on her finger. He scoffed as he dusted his knees. “Why would I do that? I don't even know your crazy behind. It just seemed to make your portrait look better.”

He wanted to embrace her, just once though. To thank her or other.

         “Hey, Keigo.”

“Mm.”

        “You have to go.”

  “What?”

       “Get up, Keigo.”

    “What are you talking about-”

      “Get up and go. Now.”

       A sharp stabbing pain shot through his abdomen, striking to his chest as his eyes snapped open. His body forced him to take deep, shuddering breaths. He was barely conscious as nurses stormed in and a doctor. Orders barked, syringe into vein.

       ‘I'm in the hospital?’

      The next day, he woke calmer and found out from the talkative Filipina nurse what had happened to him. To avoid the young couple, his car slid into one of the park's lamp post. It'd been too late to brake. The pair of youths left him screaming though.

   “You're lucky you bring yourself here in the hospital.” She said in broken English, if it was broken at all. He didn't remember going to the hospital at all. The nurse remarked though, how she wondered why he went to the park first, if he had stayed and slept there he would've died.

       “The Lord must've sent you an angel.”

     Must've.

      After days of recovery, he looked dapper for the first time since senior high school. He smoothed his hair back and exhaled shakily. Blonde hair, hazel eyes and a sharp face. It was the first time he felt grateful to his father as he looked handsome.

         “Crazy girl. Why not just tell me her name? Now I have to go to her.”

       He'd found her on social media and as old fashioned as it seemed, bought a bouquet of her favourite flowers as he headed to her house but it was not a blushing girl that he found. Rather, on the yard of her house beyond the picket fence was a poster. Her obituary,  and it said, she was to be buried today.

       He had never run faster in his life, through the neighborhood he wanted to escape but knew like that back of his hand. There were so many people in attendance as the priest said his prayers and Keigo could only stand there, barely processing the fact that his muse was gone.

        “I still…don't know your name, crazy girl.”

       As the final goodbyes, he forced his legs to move even if it meant crawling to her coffin to see her for the last time. An open coffin, a glass roof. Like Snow White. The bouquet of blue flowers he bought, the name of a flower he couldn't even pronounce, wilted and battered. Still, he dropped them with her. His first and last gift.

      As the dirt began to bury her, he noticed the gold ring on her finger.

       Many days later, he sat in his basement apartment looking every bit a madman as every great artist. “Huh, her eyes were blue, like Elizabeth Taylor… a deep blue, it seemed violet in my dreams.”

       He painted her before he could forget how she looked like. He pounded his chest that night, for a boy so repressed in his childhood, that repression of emotion carrying to his adulthood breaking like a dam. He was in a state of lost for the longest time, unable to properly acknowledge that it was loss and refusing to acknowledge it as grief.

        “This longing I have..”

       He'd been called crazy as he tried to make sense of what happened, no one believed him. That he met her in the park, that they talked and he painted her portrait so vividly he could still remember the brush strokes. She was already dead at that time, he'd been to her wake earlier that day even without knowing it. He'd spent weeks convincing others that she was not a figment of his imagination, or was she?

     So, when he was finally able, he continued and completed the painting that he started in his ‘dream’ to bring some semblance of truth in it. For the girl who lived in a brief moment. “To others she lived 26 years, to me she lived a night and eternity.”

When he completed the first portrait of his life, his first masterpiece, he titled it Indelible and changed what he originally intended to name it, the word Ephemeral scratched off from the back of the canvas. He did as she wanted, eternalised her. She haunted his art all his life. She lived there. Much would be known about the artist, little of his muse. The artist that inspired much renown only after he, too, passed.

he actually saw this I’m still freaking out from it: