Shapes

She moved to the sea. To a beach that boasted a breathtaking sunset every single night; a phenomenon rarer now in these days of gross pollution. 

Since childhood, sunsets were for her what romance was for others. They were the loveliest drug, blending night and day smoothly, quietly, peacefully.

Sitting on the sand, her musings amounted as the sun descended and she couldn’t help but wonder if such thoughtfulness was the reason sunsets existed so beautifully in the first place. To spark the mind. Or maybe they existed to slow it. This one uncertainty left her thinking for some time, despite there being nothing especially remarkable about the contemplation. 

She caught the pink in the cloud and wondered how she might paint it. Watercolor brush strokes. With her eyes closed then, she jumped atop it, and canvas in hand she scooped up the hazy pink fluff until it rested on the white background in the shape of a tree. A pink tree formed out of a cloud. She leaned back and placed the canvas on her thighs, her legs bent at the knees. She added extra color with her brush, incorporating every shade of blue from her palette. She laid the painting down on the cloud next to her, and it slowly sunk through, leaving a rectangular gap. For the rest of the night she listened to the waves and watched the stars, turning them into shapes with her mind.

She spent most of her evenings painting the clouds. On the clouds. With the clouds. It was an idealistic life. It approached her in her late twenties, after nights lost their excitement and society lost its appeal. 

She would go out consistently throughout college. She would drink what was handed to her and talk idiotically to people she had once labeled as ‘eccentric’ and ‘interesting,’ only to later reconcile with the fact that they were just hopelessly drowning, hiding behind pathetic stories of their youth to preserve a sense of narrative in their otherwise dull existences. 

By twenty-four she spent most of her nights inside. Watching TV with her boyfriend, eating takeout Italian dinners. He always told her that it would be easier and cheaper just to make pasta themselves, but he never stepped foot into the kitchen. And she never pretended to want to. 

They would watch reality TV. She recalls laughing a lot, but now she wonders if the show was funny, or if it was his presence that made her laugh. She figured she may never really know, since he took the TV with him when he left, and she had never watched it alone. After turning off the TV and folding up their takeout boxes, he would take out the trash. She didn’t like to touch it. She would shower then he would shower. And only once they were scrubbed completely clean would they get into bed.

They slept together sometimes, maybe three times a week. The frequency would fluctuate based on his moods. She never initiated it, but she was always receptive. She closed her eyes when they did it. She forced herself to envision these times as a meditation. Closing her eyes without drifting. She had fallen asleep once or twice at the beginning. Such humiliating moments where she had murmured nonsense in the middle of the act and he would get so offended that he wouldn’t speak to her the rest of the night. She apologized, and she truly felt bad, but she never really knew what to say. So she focused on improving her meditation, keeping vaguely alert in the darkness. 

They didn’t touch afterwards. He would snore while she would stare at the ceiling. She had a star-lamp to light it, and she left it glowing all night; forgetting to turn it off most days.

He broke up with her after five years together. He cried as he explained why. She just watched him. She never would have broken up with him. Not because she loved him, but because she lived her life in accordance with how society told her to, and he had always seemed to fit within that.

He had really never made her feel much of anything. She didn’t think herself emotionally lacking, though maybe she was somewhat closed off. She had always had an amazing memory, so pristine that she was often accused of lying when she claimed to remember specific moments or insights. She hated those accusations, so when she was only seven she reserved herself to talk very little. 

There wasn’t anything wrong with him. Sometimes, sitting on the beach, watching the sunset, she even missed him. Mostly his voice. The low hum of his words, though never the words themselves. The conversations in her own mind had always been more thrilling than those she’d had with him. But she was alone here now, living with birds, bugs, wind, and waves, and she sometimes missed that comfortably human tone which separated itself from all other sounds. 

She moved to the sea after their break-up. She decided to give up on the “should,” and for a bit she became delirious in her loneliness, reading psychology books she had brought in a suitcase in the hopes of understanding why. She developed an in-depth analysis of the human psyche, but never felt that any of it applied to her situation. 

After reading, most nights she would cry. She didn’t get out of bed for a while. She had no phone and no TV. She felt she had no choices, but she also recognized that this path she was on had been her choice, so to think in such a way meant victimizing herself in the pitiful and ugly manner that she had always scolded in others. At twenty-eight years old she must have cried more tears than she had in the rest of her life combined. It wasn’t always bad, the crying. Sometimes it would ignite a painful feeling in her heart, but it was a pain that a small part of her appreciated, secretly even desired.

The sunsets were always healing. Each night she ventured out in solitude, then she split her time between the sand and the clouds. Her existence in the sky went undocumented apart from her paintings, which she always set free before climbing back down to the sand. They were like a diary, not meant to be seen by anybody else. She had found peace, and that meant she felt no need to prove it.

After some time by the sea she felt better. She still cried sometimes. She laughed aloud at things spoken only in her head. She lived alone and walked alone and painted alone. The books she had read told her such an existence was dangerous, but she felt safe. Her memory worsened as days and nights seemed to eerily replicate themselves, but this only calmed her mind. She had spent most of her life feeling her identity in how much she knew. Here, she opened herself to the realization that nothing really can be known. With that recognition her identity faded. She felt, and sometimes she wondered, but mostly, like a child, she laid on her back making shapes out of stars and clouds.