He comes to see her at the hospital. She smiles the broad bewildering smile that she now always has for him. Today she calls him Matthias. She seems cognizant as if the fall had helped contextualize her. She has no broken bones, or large hemorrhages under the skin. Her ivory legs are a canvas of bruises. Some delicate like Monet’s strokes near her tibia, other dark and opaque, foreboding in their algae tones. He tries not to admire their beauty, but finds them incredibly fascinating. The hospital hallways remind him of art galleries in all their pristine, clinical sparseness. There was never any economy for space, just vast white walls and high ceilings. He remembers getting lost in throngs of art goers during an evening opening. How sweetly acidic the cheap red wine was when it touched his lips.
Certain images stand out, but their circumstance eludes him. He was drawn to abstract canvases, whose pictures remind him of his human limitations. He does not like to think of the artists as being famous. Not that he would not wish them prolific careers, but rather he enjoyed the notion that this piece was their one and only suggestion of beauty to the world. Something incredibly important, yet utterly transient: subject to the whims of society. He likens it to a flash light beam you shoot up to the sky on a summer nights. The beam travels though the solar system, upon reaching a gaseous tableau of a star, maybe it would refract. But that flash light beam would have already been forgotten about eons ago.
He wonders how long a piece of art can last for. While the physical decays, grows ochre as the canvas oxidizes, does the metaphysical not live on. Is it eternal the feelings that we get from gazing at a Van Gogh in the austerity of a museum? Maybe the physical object is only a catalyst for our greater understanding of things, and when the original fades, do we not hold it’s true essence in our memories? He does not want the Internet to diminish the potency of physical art. An excess of images wait to fill the negative space of your monitor. A digital rendering of the abstract Saint Remy skyline continues to live as pixilated wall paper on the patient check in computer by the nurse’s station. Maybe this rasterized starry night provokes thoughts of other star filled evenings that exist beyond these hospital walls.
Tonight he sits by her bed, holding her hand as she falls asleep, letting their breath sync together. He wants his presence to infect her dreams. May she dream of home.