XXIII. Spring semester. A painter called their most gifted student after class. This young painter who mixed colors like someone trying to name what hurts, who understood negative space like loneliness.
“There’s a place,” a painter said, drawing a map on the back of an ungraded essay. “Past the oak grove, follow the sound until it swallows all other sounds. The path pretends to end at the waterfall’s edge. Don’t believe it. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Find where the mist writes and words can’t follow.”
XXIV. A young painter found the falls, found the courage to walk past, the end of the path, found a poet already there, honey hair catching light like fire teaching water how to burn.
No words. The roar swallowed any need for introduction. A poet wrote. A painter sketched. The rocks between them holding space for what would come.
XXV. A poet stood to leave, handed a painter a folded paper:
things that begin without permission: spring hunger the way water decides to fall whatever this is about to be
A painter laughed, pulled out charcoal, sketched a poet quickly: nose too sharp, eyes too wide, a funhouse portrait labeled: person I’ve definitely never met
XXVI. The waterfall keeps its vigil, its perfect roar of nothing, magnificent and unnamed.
The rocks remember everything: A professor and a poet, decades ago. A poet writing a painter their child’s unsaid name. A poet recognizing a mother’s words. A new painter learning this ancient hunger.
And now: these two new unnamed things, learning the geography of silence, the language of staying infinite, the art of being everything by being nothing that can be called by name.
The water knows how to fall without ever learning why.