Page 16 of My Sweetest Obsession
Because I’ll be failing not just myself but her as well.
5
CAM
Even the thumping bass that vibrates the old floorboards beneath my bare feet can’t ground me tonight the way it usually does. The rhythmic beat typically helps me focus. It gets my head into that zone where all the visions I see inside it can flow out and onto the canvas without any real thought.
Not tonight.
Not when everything is chaos.
My mind. My body. My soul.
The meeting and then a very long talk with Dale did little to dispel any of this misery that threatens to consume me, nor the anger at myself for setting all this in motion.
It lives in each breath I take, as does Ivy’s scent that somehow still lingers in this space.
Restless energy crackles over my skin.
I pace the studio around a massive blank canvas laid out on the tarps on the floor, just waiting for me to do something—where it has remained for hours now while I haven’t been able to put anything on it.
My fingers twitch, agitated to pick up the brush and get all this emotion out.
It’s always been my only outlet.
Even as a child with a crayon in my hand, I would draw the world as I saw it and what I was feeling—first in color, then in black, white, and gray after the accident. It was how I dealt with Dad’s death, with Mom’s illness, with feeling like I wasn’t fitting into my own skin the older I got. It has always been my source of freedom.
Yet, I can’t do it tonight.
Each time I get close to snagging a brush from beside the waiting palette, I retreat to my pacing, because I can’t see what it’s supposed to be the way I should, the way I always could before.
Because it’s been her for so long that I can’t paint anything else.
But I can’t paint Ivy now.
Not anymore.
It’s always been so easy because I’ve memorized every second I’ve spent with her, locked away each minute detail about her hair, her eyes, her lips, her skin, her smile, the way she seems to radiate a pure light and obliterates the darkness always creeping in on me so I can perfectly capture it.
But all that is gone.
All I see now is the devastation on her face as she kneeled in front of me on this floor and absorbed the horrific truth…
All I see is pity and hatred in the eyes that looked at me with so much warmth only a few days ago…
All I see is her agony instead of her life and beauty.
I don’t want to paint her like that.
I don’t want to memorialize her pain.
I want to remember her like that…
My gaze drifts to the painting I did of her on the bed.
Hooded eyes filled with contentment and a lingering haze of lust gaze back at me with so much affection.
Full breasts and dusky pebbled nipples as my gaze devoured her.
