Dear Vincent
I admit that I know nothing about you. So forgive me if this letter seems more about me and less about you. But anyhow this letter is addressed to you. Because when the world has given up on me and I have given up on world, I believe if anyone can understand, it’s you. You ate yellow paint because you believed the color of happiness was yellow and that could add colors to your life as well. I think when I eat those blue and white pills, I even imagine them coloring my insides. Atleast I want my autopsy to look beautiful if I die. I know that’s not how bodies work but it would still be good to find remnants of few colors from a colorless life. Maybe you were afterall hopeful and depressed. That’s the thing about people like you and me, we keep hoping until one day we don’t. We keep hope hidden from the world like a child who is afraid his favorite chocolate might get stolen. In your starry nights,I see hints of a hopeful sunrise, a new beginning. I see yellow and blue melting into each other just like depression does. The blue of my life mixing comfortably into the yellow of my family until we create our own nights with the hope that the next morning brings something good. I see a village where you might have wanted to stay. Because it’s all about escape. Isn’t it?
Escaping days,places, time and one day eventually life. Depression is a death sentence and I have been a merciful prisoner waiting for my days to end.
I see waves in the sky, moulding into the remnants of yellow sun. Maybe your depression came in waves too,just like mine. If I could, I would have painted my life as a rainbow disappearing into dark clouds. I would have named it जन्नत(heaven). Because that’s what I am trying to make of my life. Trying to find a silver lining even without any light nearby.
Dear Vincent, we artists have death as final stroke of paint/pain on the canvas of our life. I dont mean to glorify death here, but maybe people witnessed the tragedy of your pain only after you were gone. But I don’t remember you as someone who killed himself. Who shot himself. I remember you as someone who saw sunrise from the window of his asylum and painted his entire life with few colors of blue and yellow. How long does it take vincent before a man finally convinces himself that it’s time to go. How long does one wait for his life to unfold all its layers without losing hope. How long does this pain keep crawling on our skins, until one day we say enough. Maybe you would have lived your life and died a natural death. Maybe you would have become an another artist whose art was lost amidst the heaviness of time and selective empathy. Maybe nobody would have remembered your name. Maybe nobody will remember me. After all who am I if not a sad sad person nobody wants to befriend. Maybe me dying will be the final stroke of pain/paint too but I am no good artist Vincent. I dont even know how to hold the paintbrushes. I just know that I am going to hold on a little longer. Maybe today or the day after is not when I die. Maybe after all depression doesn’t kill our hopes, but just scares us into not believing that hopes do come true. One day I was asked how I plan on dying and I didn’t know the answer Vincent. Maybe I really don’t want to die. I just want to end the monotony of life. Maybe with those waves in your starry sky, you were trying to tell after all that it’s through these tides of time,that one keeps sailing the boat of life. I am stranded Vincent. And nobody wants to rescue me. So all I am trying to do is pretend that I too am in a picture,posing, smiling in case someone looks at me from a distance I know nothing of, and find a ray of light that it is possible Vincent, to be an art still,even when life doesn’t add colors or motion to it.
Dear Vincent, today is not the day I die. And I am nearly happy for not finding the courage in the hidden nooks of my heart to end my life. I know one doomed day, I might. And it scares me.
But all I can sing right now is
“Starry starry nights
Paint your picture palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer day”
I am looking for where the sun sheds its light like a snake. I am looking for a sign Vincent that this is not how I will end my life, on a starry night, I shall live Vincent. I shall live.If you like this article, check out : https://stories.harnessmagazine.com/little-moth-blue/
