At the Art Museum - Laura

At the Art Museum

               

A bright pink flower and a bright pink bird, splashing color onto the stormy mountains. Bird and flower sing fragile, handle-with-care songs, but those water balloon clouds don’t seem to be listening.  Helpless, they wait for the clouds to pop and the wind to roar and gobble them up. So small, so beautiful, so colorful, they wait.

                A child watches the sea. It rolls; a fascinating jumble of green and blue and purple, and bubbly white at the edges.  The bubbles reach their fingers out to her, pleading her to throw off her shoes and let the cold climb up her feet.  Laughing shrieks from barefoot children tug at her legs, willing her to come in and play. But she tells them not now, because right now she is very busy. Right now, she’s tying the sand and the sea and the sky into one big bow on the back of her dress.

                 Gray shards of reality mash together.  Somewhere, an orange slice moon washes the world in blue strokes of light. Sometimes, a hand flies over an instrument’s neck, bathing the world in music. Or maybe the moon plays the music and the hand paints the light, and all around them, reality bends lines into geometric shapes. Where and when are thrown away, here is there, and now is never. Time has gotten confused and is running circles around a musician, who plays lonely songs under the moonlight.

                                How still everything is. Not a leaf flutters or a wave crashes. Even light stops moving.  Everything is caught mid-thought, mid-storm, mid-song, all stopped by a paintbrush. Each painting is a world on pause, and I’m free to explore every detail, until I could slip into the canvas. Until I could jump in next to the bird and the flower and feel dizzy because we’re right on the edge of the mountain and the ground is so far away.  And when I leave the museum, my whole world is moving a little slower, and it seems like everything is just waiting to be painted.