Chapter 136: Madness of Color

"I wanted to be a preacher," he said once, sitting outside a boarded-up church. "But they told me I cared too much. That I lived like the poor."

He looked down at his ragged boots, cracked at the sole.

"I didn't live like them. I was them."

He used to sleep on straw mats, wearing a threadbare coat through Belgian winters. He gave away his belongings to coal miners and slept in the dirt. Ate crusts of bread dipped in paint water. Once, he wrote a letter saying he hadn't eaten for two days, but he didn't mind — the sky had been beautiful that morning.

"They say I'm insane," Vincent whispered, "but maybe they just mean I'm not afraid to feel everything at once."

—

Rex had been learning many things in this journey that he hadn't learned before.

He learned how to paint pain with yellow.