Paint Filled Lungs.

Esther lives in a world where creativity is stifled and gentleness is punished. She grew up admonished for ink stained hands and paint spilled frocks. She bites off the cap of her pen and brandishes it across the page, uncaring of clean lines. At the centre of this piece is an emotion- it elicits the gnawing sensation that makes home in her lungs when she misses. Miss what? She isn’t entirely sure, but she suspects it has to do with the soft natured child  she left behind all those years ago.  The one that held her heart in her hands with  a single minded determination to save the world.

Red ink blooms across the wet page surpassing the boundaries of her rudimentary sketch. The indian inked lines blur further with each stroke of her brush. The strokes slice angry gashes across the page, as she mourns her loss.

A loss that comes from being reprimanded for caring too fiercely. Chided for  wanting to throw colour at the creeping darkness that threatened to consume her.

The older she gets the more the darkness spills into her art. Black tinged edges, discordant linework, tainted paper. Esther dearly missed who she used to be. Her hand comes up to swipe at her eyes, coming away damp. 

She reaches out and grabs her acrylics. The bright hues of early childhood. As she weighs the pink and purple in each hand, she forms a resolve. 

Pink smears across the page, leaving fingerprints in their wake. A promise to honour her young spirit, by peeling back her ribs, to once again share what should’ve been. A crooked smile graces her face.

End.

-Alice Maliyekkal