DEATH WOULD BE RAPTUROUS. TO break free from the oppressive shackles of physicality and float through the cosmos as unsullied Being. Life is a unification of barriers, a barrier of discontentment and torture that humans abide until the moment they become truly free. Death is that freedom. Death is being the negation of the very thing that gives our physicality its falsehood. In the end, our lives are merely accepting death.

Above a narrow hill among the grass idling through the windy rains of the divine sat a river amidst the tree line. Civilization had corrupted the left side of this river with its presence in the shape of lavish country homes for the wealthy should they grow tired from robbing those under them. Laura Erigone Vayne believed with a fierce heart she’d benefit from the clear country air when she convinced her husband to buy one years ago. She had no idea, nothing with an iota resembling the slightest clue that the river where the alleged pure water of the land was supposed to glide freely from one end to the other, was cursed with being. Over a quantifiable period of time Laura became a prisoner of her own despair. Within this prison she was shackled by the fear of loneliness. A loneliness from herself and her identity. Despite being relatively successful by society’s standards and mildly attractive by the divine’s, there was nothing she could do to escape. Never having believed in any sort of religion or having even a semblance of a spiritual experience, she thought her salvation laid only in death. She was an avid believer of freedom and her erroneous assumption was that the price for freedom was death. Though she was probably right, the way she went about it was certainly wrong. She had to have known... somewhere deep down, hidden behind her feigned smiles and weak handshakes, buried beneath her cruel memories and consuming darkness she knew. Eventually she’d have no choice; it had to come to this, there was no other way to atone. There was no surreal, invisible, and magical man above the horizon to grant her absolution. She was in the end, lost within herself. 

She had the kitchen knife too in case things didn’t go her way. Hopefully her husband’s pills would be enough. ... And as if they were Smarties, she shoved an entire bottle of his painkillers down her throat and sank into a deep pool of her own tears. They isolated the voices of the sycophantic idiots drowning in the adulation of their own feeble intellects. She knew better than most people how useless they were and their long-term effects wouldn’t help her one bit. None of that mattered now anyway. 

***

“Van Gogh’s colors are incredibly expressive yet we consider him a morose painter. Forget that you know anything about what he said to his brother,” I pointed to the projector doing a grave injustice to the colors of The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen with Pond and Figures, “Contemplate the painting and its colors independently; what do you see? ... Anyone?” I looked into the puzzled faces of my students.

“The bright blue is vibrant, like a patience descending upon the foliage green of the earth, which can represent fertility, life, and beginning,” a voice called through the crowd.

I spotted the culprit. The only student who ever talked in my class: Elroy Wolfe.

“Very good, how about the amber at the edge of the tree branches?” “Perhaps abundance? The coming of autumn.”

“Amber can also mean mellow and despondent. Just as blue can represent melancholy or green separation.”