XVII. Years. Then decades. A painter became a professor, teaching color theory in the same buildings where they’d pretended to be strangers.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, between lectures, the same stolen hour, returning to their unnamed place.
The path worn deeper now, steps automatic as breathing.
A painter searched for a poet in the spaces between library shelves, air a few degrees cooler, lignin sweet dust lifting the forearm’s fine hairs like static before a touch.
In the pressure bruise after thunder, eardrums holding a beat too long, that coin on the tongue taste before the rain remembers its weight.
In the heat ghost a mug leaves, the handle’s bite still printed in tendons, palm cooling around the absence it shaped.
In the way shadows feel cooler at the rim and warm to nothing in the middle, a velvet nap rubbed backward, then smooth.
In the grass’s nap reversed by a calf, damp blades splayed and springing back, not believing it yet, skin tingling where it pressed.
In the small braking space between the question and the silence that follows: teeth resting on the word, the throat unopening, lungs waiting for permission.
In negative space, which presses back: gesso tightened like a drumhead, the pull of what’s unpainted making the surface ring more clearly than any color laid down.
XVIII. A painter paints still. Canvases accumulate in the studio: the same rocks from different angles, the same water never twice the same, the absence that lives in the spray.
When galleries ask for titles, a painter shakes their head. When collectors insist on names, a painter walks away.
A gallerist sighs, inscribes:
Untitled #247 Untitled #248 Untitled #249
XIX. One September, between semesters, new students filling campus the way silence fills a room after the wrong question:
there. The hair, honey darkening in a jar, that particular gold gone deep with waiting. The way they held their books, that impossible angle, and the way they paused before speaking, as if timing their breath to someone else’s.
A painter knew before knowing, recognized the geography of genes, the inherited architecture of gesture.