He used to read from her every night now. A page, maybe two, sometimes three if he felt tempted. It had been like that since she left.
He never really cared much for her stories when they were together, but since she left he could not help it. Like some strange line to her had to be preserved, needed to be held to keep him afloat.
They were together a short while, not even a year. It started off with something silly, really, her coming into the gallery to pick up a painting for a client of hers, a brief introduction by the curator, and all the light of the world suddenly sprang from her eyes.
All the time they were together he could not draw her eyes right, he could not read all the colorful worlds she had inside.
She didn’t look at him, she gazed. It was embarrassing really, but she seemed not to be able to avoid it.
He was a prince of colors, a king of shapes, picking up the meaningless object and drawing it into life.
She virtually gasped for air in his presence. He felt a bit narcissistic around her, and has they started seeing each other he gained even more confidence and that started showing in his work.
He won award after award that year, the talent he had inside pouring out like a dam after a flood.
She was the quiet type, never spoke much, a bit shy most of the time. Not the kind to turn heads you see.
Only that light in her eyes when he was around.
He spent hours working, didn’t like to be distracted, so she sat by herself and wrote stories. Funny ones, sad ones, real and make believe ones.
He didn’t care much for them then. It was her way of passing the time until he was tired and took a break.
Then he would come out of his world, never letting her in, bathing in her relinquished admiration.
She had in him a sort of earth shuttering faith, a certainty that he was destined for greatness, an admiration that went without a spot.
There were other women of course. High legged models he met at award ceremonies, rich women waiting for a bite at the newcomer artist of the year, beautiful women just seeking a thrill.
Not one with the same light in their eyes, not one with that palette of colors springing out of their iris.
As if the colors of his drawings had fled to her eyes, seeking refuge from his enslaving. They then dropped from her round eyes to paper, coloring her lifeless stories.
He never read any of them at the time, so he knew nothing of these verbal sketches she made while he worked.
As time passed he began to grow even more famous, having to work harder every time, with lesser time for her.
Her eyes grew dimmer, like the watercolors of a pond fading with the mix of raindrops, until one day he noticed there was no more light inside.
He knew that when she looked at him now she saw only a simple boy with blank sheets of paper and a handful of unsharpened, broken down crayons.
That’s when he made her leave, when he noticed he had no more colors to share with the world.
She left as quieter as she came, some of her things left behind, her stories forgotten in a drawer.
Immersed in his sudden uncolorfulness, he never came around to throwing them away.
Until one day he picked up a couple of pages.
As he read them he began to recognize the pigment he used in one particular drawing, and then a bit of tincture from a certain painting, and some dye from a specific illustration.
At first he felt enraged, robbed, violated,
But as he went from page to page, from word to word, he began grasping the meaning of her stories.
He had never shared his colors with her, you see. For all the shades and pigments he had inside, he never found the time to let her glimpse at his world.
So she absorbed what she could from his work, saving it inside her big pondy eyes, letting it slip down as words to her stories.
Now every night he reads one or two pages, three if he feels tempted.
Sipping back all the colors into his life, he began to work again.
His most remarkable drawing if that of a woman's eyes, where if one looks close enough, all the colors in the world are to be found.
