Matt
Banned via Administration
Rows of booths lined the airy show floor, each one a window displaying the innermost secrets of the hundreds of artists at the enormous expo. He waded through a sea of art lovers, wondering if they felt the same way that he did. He felt voyeuristic just being there, and he almost blushed to recall how wonderful that feeling was. It was like walking a suburban street at night with houses whose occupants had all left the inside lights on and the curtains pulled aside, inviting onlookers to gawk blamelessly. Illuminated against the darkness, he could see so clearly the inner lives of the artists. Most were beautiful, not realistic, a myriad of colors and sensual exaggerations, paintings and photographs of impossible worlds, escapism at its finest. The artist themselves hung their smiles like picture frames, and most looked crooked to him.
In a faraway corner between a booth of washed-out nature stills and an emergency exit sign, he glimpsed through a window so familiar that he swore he had lived in that home all his life. It was a rare gallery of softer tones, darker lighting, smoother lines, and longing so palpable that he could feel it on his skin like a lover’s breath. His skin tingled as he scanned the walls of painted figures locked permanently in good fortune’s embrace. There were at least two pictures of lovers who were inches away from joining lips, forever reveling in that moment of anxious anticipation, that intoxicating eternity of breathlessness and erratic heartbeats. Without a doubt, he had found her booth.
She didn’t recognize him. They had only ever exchanged e-mails. But he knew her image from the likeness she created of herself, a non-flattering caricature with wild curly hair, eyes large and cheerless, and expressions drearier than an entire gallery of dark art that he had passed earlier. He stepped up to the table she sat behind, her eyes studying him curiously, her smile real at the sight of someone interested in her art. Her hair wasn’t so wild tied back into a ponytail.
He leaned over the table, his hands down on it for support, pretending to look over the gallery he had seen hundreds of times during his frequent visits to her online gallery. “I see why they separated you from the others.”
In the corner of his eye, she looked curious, not offended. “Do you?”
“Oh yes.” He said, finally looking directly at her, studying her closely. Her face was slightly drawn, he imagined from the sheer tedium of sitting there all day, and her eyes looked for a moment expectant. “You would take all the sales if they put you anywhere else! They have to be fair to those less talented.”
Her smile became more of a cautious smirk and her gaze broke free of his. “I bet you say that to all the girl artists.”
“Not so!” He tilted his head to follow her blue eyes. Her thick eyeliner reminded him of her caricature and made her eyes impossible to ignore. “I say the same to all the boy artists, too!”
She rolled her eyes, but he managed a single laugh out of her. She turned her head to hide her smile. He swayed rhythmically to get her attention and gestured with his chin over her right shoulder. “That picture.” She turned to look at it. “Tell me about that one.”
“That?” She pointed, and he nodded. It was a small square painting, an aerial view of a beach washed in orange light from a fading sunset. Alone lay a boy, barely more than sketched, on a towel with a vacant spot next to him marked by darker tones and rougher textures. She studied it for a moment, her face hidden as she mused. She didn’t turn to him, “Someone commissioned me to draw this years ago.”
“Was he happy with it?”
“How do you know it was a he?” She turned back to him, that same sort of bated hope in her eyes from earlier. “But yes, very. He said it was absolutely perfect. He was a bad liar, just like you.”
He turned his head from her, grinning to veil his anxiety. As much as he had rehearsed and imagined meeting her, he could do little to quell his inhibitions. “Well,” he paused, “last time I checked, I was still a he.”
Immediately she knew, and she looked ready to burst from her chair to greet him properly, but she remembered the table between them. She looked overcome with joy and then with doubt and then with surprise. “You came all the way—from another country!—and didn’t even tell me beforehand!” Then she looked frazzled, more and more like her caricature by the minute, and she hid her face again and pulled her arms over her. “I must look terrifying! I had no idea you were coming or I would’ve—”
“You look beautiful.” She looked thoroughly unconvinced, but she was calmed. Smiling, he found a black binder in front of her and opened it. Inside were more prints of that familiar art he had admired for years, dozens of pages from a thinly veiled memoir detailing a life of longing. As he flipped through the chapters, she looked up at him curiously, surely wondering why he was suddenly so silent. He could never admit to her how frightened he was of embarrassing himself, of saying anything stupid to the woman he had admired and commissioned for years.
He stumbled upon a picture unknown to him. A curly-haired young woman, obviously the artist, lay in a garden surrounded entirely in a sea of colors. She lay in a classical pose with one hand rested on her hip, the other’s fingertips tenderly caressing the long thin petals of a deep blue flower, a kind he had never seen before. Its dozens of pedals splayed from its white center like streams of water falling in a fountain. Her eyes were hidden in the painting, but her slightly parted lips clearly showed that she was admiring the beatific flower. The top half of the painting portrayed a sky full of white stars. At first he didn’t notice the blue star directly above the mysterious flower. Unable to look away from the brilliant lines and coloring that all expertly drew his eye back to the flower, he asked, “Why is such a wonderful work of art not part of your online gallery?”
She frowned, a strange reaction to a compliment, and said, “My roommate must have put that in my binder without me knowing.” She pulled the binder away from him and contemplated the picture. “This is a very personal picture to me. It wasn’t meant to be shared.”
“Ooh,” he smiled encouragingly, “sounds like there’s a good story behind it.”
She half-looked up over the binder, smiling weakly. “Then you’ll be disappointed if I tell you.” Her eyes studied the picture again, tracing the patterns slowly back to the blue focal point. “It’s nothing.”
“No way!” He protested with a laugh. “If it’s personal then it must be something. Please share—I promise I won’t laugh!” How absurd that must have sounded as he laughed.
She rolled her eyes but wore a peculiar grin. “Fine, I’ll share—but only because begging is so unbecoming of you.” With one last look at the painting, she took a deep breath and told him of her grandmother. This admirable woman had spent her lifetime as a volunteer worker, aiding impoverished nations with her seamstress abilities, selflessly dedicating her life to those less fortunate. When she was diagnosed in the incurably late stages with breast cancer, she decided to return home to spend her final days with the eight year old granddaughter she had never known, to whom she passed down the saint-like empathy that inspired her granddaughter to become an artist.
When asked about the grandfather she had never met, her grandmother had also passed down a fantastic tale of love in which a young foreign man appeared before a drought-stricken village and fell in love with a local girl. A jealous wizard of the area also had feelings for this girl and devised a curse to turn the foreigner into a nameless blue flower. The young woman mourned the loss of her admirer, never falling for the wizard. She stood the flower up in the ground in the middle of the barren fields and the flower took root, and though it was not the wizard’s intent, the spirit within the flower shared its love with the land and leant its energy slowly into reviving the once dead crops and various plants of the area. The wizard took credit for the miracle and became drunk with fame, eventually forgetting about the girl and her cursed lover entirely. The girl visited the flower every night, sad for a lover she had never truly known, but thankful for his undying benevolence, until it wilted and died one year after it took root, the land fully restored.
She explained to him how much the story had touched her, its magic an important part of her even in her mid-twenties. Every single year on the anniversary of her grandmother’s passing she repainted the same scene from the story, each time making the image evermore magical.
“Wait,” he said, “what’s the significance of the blue star?”
She laughed. “What can I say? I love visual balance.”
They found themselves ascending, floating steadily into the night sky, a glass elevator their very own rocket ship. She lived in the city’s center in one of the taller apartment buildings. They had decided that it would be criminal for them not to spend the remainder of the day together, and she had decided that they should spend their final hours atop the world.
On the rooftop, two lounge chairs awaited them. They lay down and poured themselves glasses of merlot, thanking the comfortable air but cursing the light pollution—or had they laughed at that? He’d always confused the two. Either way, he was sure that there was some significance to them being so close to the stars and yet unable to see them.
But they pretended to see them as if they were interpreting clouds, certain that the animals had camouflage that only they could see through. “I think I see it! Yes—I see it!”
“Oh yeah?” He said. “You really see an elephant?”
She laughed. “How could you miss it?”
“Aha! I tricked you!” He nudged her with his free hand and pointed upward. “That’s not an elephant at all! That’s clearly a blue star of questionable significance!”
Again she laughed. “No, I definitely see an elephant.”
“You would say that!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?
“It means have another drink!” He topped off her glass and poured the rest of the bottle’s contents into his own. There was a long silence except for their occasional giggling and the faint echo of the cars far below them. He turned himself fully to her, careful not to spill his drink, and said, “I want to buy that picture.”
She was silent, her eyes fixed on the hazy sky, painting new worlds to escape to. She took another drink. “Do you?”
The question took him by surprise. “Yes.” He said. “Yeah.”
She grinned, “You’re awfully cruel—you know that, right?” Her grin quickly melted away as she contemplated the matter. She seemed distraught. “I don’t think I can part with it. It means too much to me.”
He was a terrible businessman after so quickly drinking a half bottle of wine. “I’ll give you 600 and that’s my final offer!”
“Cruel!” She exclaimed, bristling and clearly flustered.
“It’s so good!” He insisted. “It should at least be shared. What if I wrote a story about it, too?”
“No. I don’t know. It’s too personal!”
He didn’t argue with her. There was something about her expression, about those silhouetted blue eyes that showed so clearly what she was feeling, that filled him with such guilt but also with such adoration. He felt heavy. “I’m sorry.” he said, laying back down and trying to see what she saw. “Forget I ever mentioned it.”
Her breathing became heavier and her lips parted in a way that was immediately familiar to him. The world slowed, and they drank the silence for a long while. She seemed to already be dreaming when she finally spoke again, barely above a whisper, “Maybe if you brought me a nameless blue flower.”
He turned his head to her, struggling to read her expression with her eyes now closed. “Too easy. They’re all nameless to me.” Almost imperceptibly, her lips slowly curled into a smile and stayed that way well into her sleep. His gaze never straying from her lips, the muffled echo of the street cars far below steadily faded, and he was certain that he could hear her heart beating.
Unsure of how much time had passed, his eyes opened after a long blink to a field of stars. The city lights had vanished and so too had the city sounds. Amid the countless white specks in the sky a single blue star hung low in the east. He turned to the angel sleeping next to him to be sure that he wasn’t dreaming. Except for the soft light her body emitted, she was exactly as beautiful as he remembered her. He watched her stomach slowly rise and fall. He watched her hair sway in the warm breeze. He watched her lips, still open, waiting for them to move. He was convinced that she had never been more real than when she lay next to him.
He sat up, the distant blue light catching his eye again. If this lone star were a matter of visual balance, then he reasoned that a nameless blue flower awaited him beneath it. Abandoning reason, he stood and faced the east and was amazed at what he saw. As high as the rooftop, calm waters had filled the city, the stars reflecting off the glassy surface to create such balance.
He moved cautiously to the roof’s edge and peered out over the water, his view blocked in all directions by taller buildings. Just over the edge of the building was an orange wooden boat, two oars crossed in the center. His heart racing, he turned back to take a long look at her, sad for her that she couldn’t see this immaculate scene.
He climbed into the boat, steadying himself as it swayed and immediately moved away from the building before his second foot came down. He dropped to the seat and picked up the oars, quickly placing them over the sides to position the boat eastward. With measured calm, he rowed.
The windows in the buildings he passed reflected him and reflected that perfect symmetry that could only be dreamed up by an artist. The buildings seemed to drift away as he neared them, clearing a path for him. The star moved steadily overhead. He felt lost chasing what may or may not have been, but the feeling was so natural. He went on.
Finally he spotted a building straight ahead that grew larger as he neared it, and there were no others in sight. The walls were just high enough that he could not clearly see over them, although the nearer he drew, the more he surely saw faint colors rising up from the square island against the otherwise dark sky.
He angled the boat to the side of the building and pulled the oars in. Careful not to lose his balance, he stood and grabbed hold of the concrete ledge, struggling to pull himself up over it. He looked over the ledge and was drowned in colors. Covering every inch of the large metal island was a lush garden with flowers and shrubberies and small trees of all colors and sizes.
He hoisted himself fully over the ledge and stood tall, rapt with every colorful detail until he looked straight up and saw that blue star almost directly overhead. He found a winding path of round stones and he followed it, so determined to find the blue flower that he ignored the hundreds of others that he passed.
The path emerged into a spacious grotto, at the center of which was a single blue flower with petals that bloomed like a majestic firework exploding and lighting the sky. He rushed to it, his heart pounding, and he hesitated to go to his knees.
“Hullo!” The voice of a man startled him. He turned around to see an elderly man sitting on a stone bench, sunglasses covering his eyes, a cane in hand. “Who’s there?”
“I—” He had the impulse to take the flower and run, but that impulse was quickly crushed by doubt. He said sadly, “I just came to look at the flowers.”
“Oh!” The old man looked delighted. He pointed towards the blue flower with his cane. “Lovely, ain’t she?”
“Yeah.” He took a step back from the flower. “She’s great.”
“Oh, don’t be modest now! Prettiest flower I ever saw, if I recall right!” The old man scratched his beard and grinned. “Eight short petals sticking out like little bow ties from a, uh, yellow center, am I right, boy?”
He looked closely at it, remarking at how wrong the old man’s memory of the flower was. Should he tell the truth? How could he tell a blind man that something he holds so dear is a lie? He sighed, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”
The old man laughed. “If you want her, I guess I can’t stop you from taking her.” He thought about taking it again, and again the thought crushed him not from guilt but from doubt. “I bet a flower like that would win a girl’s heart easily!” After a pause, the old man stood slowly and worked his way to the edge of the grotto, “Well, it’s gettin’ late. It’s off to bed with me. Enjoy the flowers!”
Alone, he closed his eyes and mulled whether or not to take the flower. And when his reason finally returned to him, he knew with utmost certainty that she wasn’t worth it, that not even in a dream did she deserve to be loved. When he opened his eyes again, he was on the same rooftop he started on, and he lay himself back down on the lounge chair and closed his eyes to sleep but not before looking at her one last time, disappointed in everything that he saw.
She awoke on the rooftop with the sun peeking its rays over the skyline, and her eyes burned with shame as the dream from the night before played itself again and again in her mind. In crippling self-defeat, she turned herself away from him, cursing him for having even come at all.
In a faraway corner between a booth of washed-out nature stills and an emergency exit sign, he glimpsed through a window so familiar that he swore he had lived in that home all his life. It was a rare gallery of softer tones, darker lighting, smoother lines, and longing so palpable that he could feel it on his skin like a lover’s breath. His skin tingled as he scanned the walls of painted figures locked permanently in good fortune’s embrace. There were at least two pictures of lovers who were inches away from joining lips, forever reveling in that moment of anxious anticipation, that intoxicating eternity of breathlessness and erratic heartbeats. Without a doubt, he had found her booth.
She didn’t recognize him. They had only ever exchanged e-mails. But he knew her image from the likeness she created of herself, a non-flattering caricature with wild curly hair, eyes large and cheerless, and expressions drearier than an entire gallery of dark art that he had passed earlier. He stepped up to the table she sat behind, her eyes studying him curiously, her smile real at the sight of someone interested in her art. Her hair wasn’t so wild tied back into a ponytail.
He leaned over the table, his hands down on it for support, pretending to look over the gallery he had seen hundreds of times during his frequent visits to her online gallery. “I see why they separated you from the others.”
In the corner of his eye, she looked curious, not offended. “Do you?”
“Oh yes.” He said, finally looking directly at her, studying her closely. Her face was slightly drawn, he imagined from the sheer tedium of sitting there all day, and her eyes looked for a moment expectant. “You would take all the sales if they put you anywhere else! They have to be fair to those less talented.”
Her smile became more of a cautious smirk and her gaze broke free of his. “I bet you say that to all the girl artists.”
“Not so!” He tilted his head to follow her blue eyes. Her thick eyeliner reminded him of her caricature and made her eyes impossible to ignore. “I say the same to all the boy artists, too!”
She rolled her eyes, but he managed a single laugh out of her. She turned her head to hide her smile. He swayed rhythmically to get her attention and gestured with his chin over her right shoulder. “That picture.” She turned to look at it. “Tell me about that one.”
“That?” She pointed, and he nodded. It was a small square painting, an aerial view of a beach washed in orange light from a fading sunset. Alone lay a boy, barely more than sketched, on a towel with a vacant spot next to him marked by darker tones and rougher textures. She studied it for a moment, her face hidden as she mused. She didn’t turn to him, “Someone commissioned me to draw this years ago.”
“Was he happy with it?”
“How do you know it was a he?” She turned back to him, that same sort of bated hope in her eyes from earlier. “But yes, very. He said it was absolutely perfect. He was a bad liar, just like you.”
He turned his head from her, grinning to veil his anxiety. As much as he had rehearsed and imagined meeting her, he could do little to quell his inhibitions. “Well,” he paused, “last time I checked, I was still a he.”
Immediately she knew, and she looked ready to burst from her chair to greet him properly, but she remembered the table between them. She looked overcome with joy and then with doubt and then with surprise. “You came all the way—from another country!—and didn’t even tell me beforehand!” Then she looked frazzled, more and more like her caricature by the minute, and she hid her face again and pulled her arms over her. “I must look terrifying! I had no idea you were coming or I would’ve—”
“You look beautiful.” She looked thoroughly unconvinced, but she was calmed. Smiling, he found a black binder in front of her and opened it. Inside were more prints of that familiar art he had admired for years, dozens of pages from a thinly veiled memoir detailing a life of longing. As he flipped through the chapters, she looked up at him curiously, surely wondering why he was suddenly so silent. He could never admit to her how frightened he was of embarrassing himself, of saying anything stupid to the woman he had admired and commissioned for years.
He stumbled upon a picture unknown to him. A curly-haired young woman, obviously the artist, lay in a garden surrounded entirely in a sea of colors. She lay in a classical pose with one hand rested on her hip, the other’s fingertips tenderly caressing the long thin petals of a deep blue flower, a kind he had never seen before. Its dozens of pedals splayed from its white center like streams of water falling in a fountain. Her eyes were hidden in the painting, but her slightly parted lips clearly showed that she was admiring the beatific flower. The top half of the painting portrayed a sky full of white stars. At first he didn’t notice the blue star directly above the mysterious flower. Unable to look away from the brilliant lines and coloring that all expertly drew his eye back to the flower, he asked, “Why is such a wonderful work of art not part of your online gallery?”
She frowned, a strange reaction to a compliment, and said, “My roommate must have put that in my binder without me knowing.” She pulled the binder away from him and contemplated the picture. “This is a very personal picture to me. It wasn’t meant to be shared.”
“Ooh,” he smiled encouragingly, “sounds like there’s a good story behind it.”
She half-looked up over the binder, smiling weakly. “Then you’ll be disappointed if I tell you.” Her eyes studied the picture again, tracing the patterns slowly back to the blue focal point. “It’s nothing.”
“No way!” He protested with a laugh. “If it’s personal then it must be something. Please share—I promise I won’t laugh!” How absurd that must have sounded as he laughed.
She rolled her eyes but wore a peculiar grin. “Fine, I’ll share—but only because begging is so unbecoming of you.” With one last look at the painting, she took a deep breath and told him of her grandmother. This admirable woman had spent her lifetime as a volunteer worker, aiding impoverished nations with her seamstress abilities, selflessly dedicating her life to those less fortunate. When she was diagnosed in the incurably late stages with breast cancer, she decided to return home to spend her final days with the eight year old granddaughter she had never known, to whom she passed down the saint-like empathy that inspired her granddaughter to become an artist.
When asked about the grandfather she had never met, her grandmother had also passed down a fantastic tale of love in which a young foreign man appeared before a drought-stricken village and fell in love with a local girl. A jealous wizard of the area also had feelings for this girl and devised a curse to turn the foreigner into a nameless blue flower. The young woman mourned the loss of her admirer, never falling for the wizard. She stood the flower up in the ground in the middle of the barren fields and the flower took root, and though it was not the wizard’s intent, the spirit within the flower shared its love with the land and leant its energy slowly into reviving the once dead crops and various plants of the area. The wizard took credit for the miracle and became drunk with fame, eventually forgetting about the girl and her cursed lover entirely. The girl visited the flower every night, sad for a lover she had never truly known, but thankful for his undying benevolence, until it wilted and died one year after it took root, the land fully restored.
She explained to him how much the story had touched her, its magic an important part of her even in her mid-twenties. Every single year on the anniversary of her grandmother’s passing she repainted the same scene from the story, each time making the image evermore magical.
“Wait,” he said, “what’s the significance of the blue star?”
She laughed. “What can I say? I love visual balance.”
They found themselves ascending, floating steadily into the night sky, a glass elevator their very own rocket ship. She lived in the city’s center in one of the taller apartment buildings. They had decided that it would be criminal for them not to spend the remainder of the day together, and she had decided that they should spend their final hours atop the world.
On the rooftop, two lounge chairs awaited them. They lay down and poured themselves glasses of merlot, thanking the comfortable air but cursing the light pollution—or had they laughed at that? He’d always confused the two. Either way, he was sure that there was some significance to them being so close to the stars and yet unable to see them.
But they pretended to see them as if they were interpreting clouds, certain that the animals had camouflage that only they could see through. “I think I see it! Yes—I see it!”
“Oh yeah?” He said. “You really see an elephant?”
She laughed. “How could you miss it?”
“Aha! I tricked you!” He nudged her with his free hand and pointed upward. “That’s not an elephant at all! That’s clearly a blue star of questionable significance!”
Again she laughed. “No, I definitely see an elephant.”
“You would say that!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?
“It means have another drink!” He topped off her glass and poured the rest of the bottle’s contents into his own. There was a long silence except for their occasional giggling and the faint echo of the cars far below them. He turned himself fully to her, careful not to spill his drink, and said, “I want to buy that picture.”
She was silent, her eyes fixed on the hazy sky, painting new worlds to escape to. She took another drink. “Do you?”
The question took him by surprise. “Yes.” He said. “Yeah.”
She grinned, “You’re awfully cruel—you know that, right?” Her grin quickly melted away as she contemplated the matter. She seemed distraught. “I don’t think I can part with it. It means too much to me.”
He was a terrible businessman after so quickly drinking a half bottle of wine. “I’ll give you 600 and that’s my final offer!”
“Cruel!” She exclaimed, bristling and clearly flustered.
“It’s so good!” He insisted. “It should at least be shared. What if I wrote a story about it, too?”
“No. I don’t know. It’s too personal!”
He didn’t argue with her. There was something about her expression, about those silhouetted blue eyes that showed so clearly what she was feeling, that filled him with such guilt but also with such adoration. He felt heavy. “I’m sorry.” he said, laying back down and trying to see what she saw. “Forget I ever mentioned it.”
Her breathing became heavier and her lips parted in a way that was immediately familiar to him. The world slowed, and they drank the silence for a long while. She seemed to already be dreaming when she finally spoke again, barely above a whisper, “Maybe if you brought me a nameless blue flower.”
He turned his head to her, struggling to read her expression with her eyes now closed. “Too easy. They’re all nameless to me.” Almost imperceptibly, her lips slowly curled into a smile and stayed that way well into her sleep. His gaze never straying from her lips, the muffled echo of the street cars far below steadily faded, and he was certain that he could hear her heart beating.
Unsure of how much time had passed, his eyes opened after a long blink to a field of stars. The city lights had vanished and so too had the city sounds. Amid the countless white specks in the sky a single blue star hung low in the east. He turned to the angel sleeping next to him to be sure that he wasn’t dreaming. Except for the soft light her body emitted, she was exactly as beautiful as he remembered her. He watched her stomach slowly rise and fall. He watched her hair sway in the warm breeze. He watched her lips, still open, waiting for them to move. He was convinced that she had never been more real than when she lay next to him.
He sat up, the distant blue light catching his eye again. If this lone star were a matter of visual balance, then he reasoned that a nameless blue flower awaited him beneath it. Abandoning reason, he stood and faced the east and was amazed at what he saw. As high as the rooftop, calm waters had filled the city, the stars reflecting off the glassy surface to create such balance.
He moved cautiously to the roof’s edge and peered out over the water, his view blocked in all directions by taller buildings. Just over the edge of the building was an orange wooden boat, two oars crossed in the center. His heart racing, he turned back to take a long look at her, sad for her that she couldn’t see this immaculate scene.
He climbed into the boat, steadying himself as it swayed and immediately moved away from the building before his second foot came down. He dropped to the seat and picked up the oars, quickly placing them over the sides to position the boat eastward. With measured calm, he rowed.
The windows in the buildings he passed reflected him and reflected that perfect symmetry that could only be dreamed up by an artist. The buildings seemed to drift away as he neared them, clearing a path for him. The star moved steadily overhead. He felt lost chasing what may or may not have been, but the feeling was so natural. He went on.
Finally he spotted a building straight ahead that grew larger as he neared it, and there were no others in sight. The walls were just high enough that he could not clearly see over them, although the nearer he drew, the more he surely saw faint colors rising up from the square island against the otherwise dark sky.
He angled the boat to the side of the building and pulled the oars in. Careful not to lose his balance, he stood and grabbed hold of the concrete ledge, struggling to pull himself up over it. He looked over the ledge and was drowned in colors. Covering every inch of the large metal island was a lush garden with flowers and shrubberies and small trees of all colors and sizes.
He hoisted himself fully over the ledge and stood tall, rapt with every colorful detail until he looked straight up and saw that blue star almost directly overhead. He found a winding path of round stones and he followed it, so determined to find the blue flower that he ignored the hundreds of others that he passed.
The path emerged into a spacious grotto, at the center of which was a single blue flower with petals that bloomed like a majestic firework exploding and lighting the sky. He rushed to it, his heart pounding, and he hesitated to go to his knees.
“Hullo!” The voice of a man startled him. He turned around to see an elderly man sitting on a stone bench, sunglasses covering his eyes, a cane in hand. “Who’s there?”
“I—” He had the impulse to take the flower and run, but that impulse was quickly crushed by doubt. He said sadly, “I just came to look at the flowers.”
“Oh!” The old man looked delighted. He pointed towards the blue flower with his cane. “Lovely, ain’t she?”
“Yeah.” He took a step back from the flower. “She’s great.”
“Oh, don’t be modest now! Prettiest flower I ever saw, if I recall right!” The old man scratched his beard and grinned. “Eight short petals sticking out like little bow ties from a, uh, yellow center, am I right, boy?”
He looked closely at it, remarking at how wrong the old man’s memory of the flower was. Should he tell the truth? How could he tell a blind man that something he holds so dear is a lie? He sighed, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”
The old man laughed. “If you want her, I guess I can’t stop you from taking her.” He thought about taking it again, and again the thought crushed him not from guilt but from doubt. “I bet a flower like that would win a girl’s heart easily!” After a pause, the old man stood slowly and worked his way to the edge of the grotto, “Well, it’s gettin’ late. It’s off to bed with me. Enjoy the flowers!”
Alone, he closed his eyes and mulled whether or not to take the flower. And when his reason finally returned to him, he knew with utmost certainty that she wasn’t worth it, that not even in a dream did she deserve to be loved. When he opened his eyes again, he was on the same rooftop he started on, and he lay himself back down on the lounge chair and closed his eyes to sleep but not before looking at her one last time, disappointed in everything that he saw.
She awoke on the rooftop with the sun peeking its rays over the skyline, and her eyes burned with shame as the dream from the night before played itself again and again in her mind. In crippling self-defeat, she turned herself away from him, cursing him for having even come at all.
