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The Blue Painting



The room is resounded with a little wearied voice chanting plaintively of flowers. Flowers, as the chant goes, are like fugitive happiness, utterly ravaged the point when you too dearly fondle them. Flowers, however, are what this room is deprived of. The room is dismally poky and contains only some cumbersome cupboards, which are glass-fronted, and show the reflection of a young lady who professes a penchant of having her life staring back at her. But the presence of the young lady remains invisible to whoever witnessing the depicted scene, saves the white lace dress, which whiteness is now somewhat compromised by a few stains of dirt, she was wearing on the day of her unaccountable disappearance. Away the white dress sashays and dances, controlled by a pair of hands that are also nowhere to be seen.

No sentiments or emotions reign supreme in this derelict house. Nor are evil spirits that are provoked to their vicious extremes. Rancours of long ago, of yesterday, are pardoned in this place where time is constantly trapped in a speeding circle: winter has yet laid its frosty spell before it is rushed to summer at its most torrid. One minute you are the newly-crowned champion, the next you are trampled on the ground, the lowest of the abject. How many hitherto redoubtable kings she now mocks, how many foes of hers she relishes in tormenting. The imperious hand gives the wheel of fate yet another turn.

We now advance to the stage where the young lady is already immortalised, in a portrait hung on the wall, facing the window. It is the first time we encounter our young lady in flesh and blood, for virtually we have the impression that what we behold is not merely a painting, but the young lady herself, like a spectre whose body is translucent, is floating before the picture frame, her gaze constantly fixing upon ours wherever we go. Under such vigilance of the young lady we however confess that we do not find her watchful gaze in any way provocative or frightening. Even the lights that occasionally flood in through the window fail to ignite the fire in her eyes, the fire that some once described as blue and smoke-filled.

The portrait looks like throngs of heavy smoke. Our desire to see our young lady more clearly is obstructed by the painting’s nebulousness. The portrait does nothing to supply sufficient knowledge of a young lady who has lived so quietly all her life, that very little is known about her. What we behold, as we discover, is not too far from the invisible young lady straying about the dinky room. To strain our eyes in order to see through the invisibleness we have white, doughy smoke swimming in our eyes.


The image of flowers suddenly takes dominance of all. White poppies blossom in the depth of night, or before the break of dawn when faint traces of every colour run amok. That is what Blue is like, we finally realise. It is the pitch dark when the innocent white explode here and there. It is the union of these two colours that create the opaque. It is the invisible that we pretend we have witnessed with unquestionable clarity. Ultimately Blue is the room where time plods on, before uttering almost inaudibly the transience of love, and these beautiful sweet nothings will be sublimated into the flaky, fluffy, inconsequential potions, teeming the air.

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