Dreaming towards Infinity
--- Prologue ---
In one part of the city.... at night......
A storm continued outside, spilling sporadic light into the dark apartment room. Many moving boxes filled the room, some open, some taped closed, and some folded shut but near bulging. A dark green sweatshirt sleeve dangled out of one. A beaten box with a broken flap revealed worn covers of books, a couple wrapped in newspaper. Something had left a dent in another. In the middle of the room, a couple boxes had been pulled away from the rest and now stood mostly empty.
Lightning flashed across the recesses of the room, bringing out more details. A white sheet trailed out of one of the middle boxes. Partly burnt, crinkled, it was somehow covered in ash and dirt. A long ruler and the top of a large drawing compass leaned against the side of another. The ruler, especially, had been splattered in dark red liquid. More liquid splashed the dingy walls, blinking different shades in the pale light. In the middle of the room, the artist still painted on his easel, not pausing.
For a few moments, the tall hunched figure wiped brush after brush of paint down the page. Suddenly, at a harsher burst of wind, he whirled the current brush away into the recesses of his room, slashing another strip of vibrant colors across his room, even across his bedding in one corner. Gasping, unkempt dark hair in his eyes, the artist knelt and plucked another from the nearest box. His breathing slowed.
For hours, he continued thus, eerily silent and slowly painting, then tossing the offending brush away, rippling more color across his dark room. Always he knelt and selected a new one afterwards, harsh breathing settling again into calm sighs. For a while, this pattern continued, until he seemed to run low of brushes from the box below. His tendency to throw supplies slowed. It didn't halt however.
When he rose his hand to toss the second to last brush, eyes glancing to his collection, he froze, pausing. Slowly, inch-by-inch, he lowered his hand, setting the offending brush on the easel by his pallet of colors. He waded into the collection of boxes. Pushing a box off one marked 'KEEP' in red marker, he ripped the tape off, opening it. He tossed towels and jackets aside, not caring if the cloth landed in a pool of red or indigo or yellow, and finally pulled out a handful of brushes wrapped together in a rubber band. An eagle feather trailed from band. His eyes narrowed slightly. The artist turned around, strolling back to his chaotic easel. He set the group of smaller brushes on the ground by a toolbox and glanced back at the project before him.
A whirlwind of colors spun and twisted back at him. In most of the places, the paints had melted into each other, merely reflecting the dingy room around it, in dull greys, mud browns, sickly yellow greens, and many different levels of blacks. Occasionally though, the dark pattern broke, and few strands of warm color greeted his eyes. A line of gold, a circle of blue and violet, a spike of green, and most of all, many splashes of crimson danced across the page.
The artist sighed and took off his current jacket, revealing a black T-shirt covering skinny arms, battered and bruised. He tossed the jacket into a corner untouched by the paint. Brushing back his blonde-streaked hair, his knees collapsed on one moving box as he stared back at his product.
"Again," he whispered in a hoarse voice. "Again, the red refuses to blend with the rest. Why can't I change that? Why am I obsessed with that color?"
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