between colo(u)rs
Komposition 8, Vasily Kandinsky
She stared at the blank canvas for the fourth hour straight.
Not waiting for inspiration -- that was the problem.
She could see inspiration everywhere: the way afternoon light sliced through her studio window, the coffee ring staining her desk, even the frustrated breath fogging up her glasses. She could see it all, analyze it, appreciate its potential. But her hands wouldn't move.
Without the familiar pull of creation, everything else looked ridiculous.
She walked to the grocery store and watched people examine bananas with the seriousness of art critics. Why this banana over that one? she wondered. What's the point of any of it? The fluorescent lights hummed their meaningless tune while strangers performed the ritual of commerce, trading green paper for yellow fruit, all of them pretending this made sense.
Her neighbor knocked to complain about her music being too loud.
She hadn't played music in three weeks.
"Sorry," she said anyway, because that's what people did.
They apologized for things that weren't real, worried about problems that didn't exist, and built entire lives around the assumption that any of it mattered.
She used to paint to escape thoughts like these. Canvas was where chaos became beauty, where randomness found purpose. But now the canvas just sat there, reflecting her own blankness back at her.
Her phone buzzed.
A friend asking how her latest piece was coming along.
"Great," she typed back.
Another meaningless exchange in the grand theater of pretending.
She set the phone down and looked at her hands. These same hands had once moved without her permission, guided by something that felt bigger than herself. Now they just hung there, ordinary flesh attached to ordinary bones, waiting for orders from a brain that had forgotten how to dream.
The sun was setting, painting her white walls orange. Beautiful, she noted clinically. Completely beautiful and completely pointless.
Tomorrow she would try again. Or maybe she wouldn't. In the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't matter either way.
But tonight, she would sit with the terrible clarity of a creator who couldn't create, watching the world perform its elaborate pantomime of meaning while the canvas stayed blank and honest.