Reality 000

I hopelessly turned my eyes onto the canvas in front of me. It was plain white, as anyone would expect from an unused canvas.

I just looked at it, because there was nothing else I could do. It wasn't particularly hard to figure out how to use a paint brush, but my lack of artistic talent and experience was the problem.

So I simply stared at it. I could swear, despite being an inanimate object, it stared back at me.

I wished for that canvas to enlarge and pull me into the eternal whiteness, so I could at least escape from the situation I was in.

I stood up from the chair I was sitting on, and walked to the door.

"Mister, please listen..." I said. "If you are there, please listen to me. Unfortunately, there is no way I can reproduce the masterpiece that you have created earlier; but I swear, if you give me another way I can apologise and pay you back, I am ready for it. I am sincerely sorry."

I waited for a couple of seconds. Nothing at all happened; either he wasn't there or he wouldn't talk to me.

I hit my fist on the door to make noise.

"Mister! Mister!"

My response was another disappointing silence. In frusturation, I kept hitting the door harder and harder, until I got tired.

"Help me! Get me out! Anyone, please help!"

It didn't only not work, but it also left me with no energy or will to do anything.

"Fine..." I said, slightly angry. I took a few colors of paint and a paint brush before getting in front of the canvas. "You want a rose? Well, here is your damned rose!"

Dipping the brush into water and paints in a mostly random order, I started painting something on the canvas; something that could barely resemble a plant, let alone a flower, or more specifically, a rose.

"I could at least try a little, you would think that wouldn't you?" I said to an imaginary version of the man, in my head. Starting a second iteration of painting, I managed the get the object to resemble a red flower... just... sort of.

I took the real red rose that was given to me as the model, and put it by my painting's side to compare them. They had pretty much nothing in common, maybe except their shades of red were a bit similar.

Just as frusturated as I was several minutes ago, I took the canvas without remembering to give some time for the paint to dry completely. My hand messed up a corner of the painting, leaving a hand-shaped mark there; and my left hand was covered in dark gray paint - that is, the color of the rose's background. I shook my hand around to get rid of the paint as much as I could, further messing up the painting I barely even cared about.

"There!" I screamed my lungs out. "Here is your rose! Is that what you wanted!?"

The door of the room got unlocked. The man who had brought me here earlier came in, got past and ignored me, went straight to the painting and took it. Examining it for only a few seconds, he carried the canvas out of the room.

"May I lea-" I was going to ask him, but I decided not to. "Screw it, I am leaving either way!"

I left the room just after him, but my curiosity didn't let go. I watched the man so that I could see what he was going to do with my canvas.

He walked towards the exact place where I had smashed down the original rose painting. The area was not cleaned, everything was still there: The messed up painting, the small glass pieces and the broken wooden frame... Even the blood marks!

The man silently walked and put my canvas where the original painting was hanging before I brought it down. A few people watching the man got intrigued, so they gathered around to take a look at it.

It was sort of a shock.

I could see the shine in people's eyes, they seemed to have liked it! Some of them had even started questioning the symbolism that concerns the dirty mess around the canvas and my "angry" painting of (what should have been) a rose.

Suddenly, I felt a shock through my body. My memories were recalled, and I found myself in a brief darkness. When the lights came back on, I was in a cave, standing on top of a stone platform all by myself.

"What the hell?" was my only intelligable reaction.

"I don't exactly know what you went through, but it must have been tough for you." a familiar deep voice said.

"It... was." I said.

"It was a small representation of some of your greatest fears in life." the voice said. "It could be losing a beloved one, it could be having to leave something valuable behind; or it could be something more physical like heights, arachnids or even something related to death, like a traffic accident... or so on."

"I can tell you, it wasn't pleasant." I said. "But if that was the purpose, it was right on point."

"So, tell me, young one..." he said. "What did you learn from that short yet powerful experience?"

"Uhm..." I thought about it for a while.

"Take your time." he said.

"I learned that... that you can not replace something original once you lose it." I said.

"Intriguing." the voice replied.

"I also learned how easy our senses can deceive us." I added.

"Very well..."

"And... I learned that people are prejudiced." I said. There was some thought behind this... If that artist man wasn't the one who put my rose painting there, but instead I had went and put it on the gallery... Would people even look at that abomination? But since he, the painter of the original (and much more beautiful) rose painting, went and put the new painting up there; people had thought that there was something real in it.

"Allow me to read your thoughts for a while..." the voice said to me.

"You can?" I asked.

"Perhaps the lesson you had to take wasn't the fact that people are prejudiced, but that most beautiful art pieces are results of great emotional distress."

"Is this... metaphorical or are you saying this because it really applies to art?"