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My Eyes

I was called an artist before, but what they called me depended on who they were. The plebian masses called me an artist as they passed by the alleyway I chose as my studio that week. The ‘Authorities’ called me a vandal and public menace but I know they were jealous of my talent, that I would be free while they were the lapdogs of the machine. People asked me what I called myself, and then they got offended when I told them: ‘God’. Oh you should have heard the people, calling me ‘arrogant’ and ‘blasphemous’, like they knew what it was like to even have the feeling I did when I created a piece, when I gave it life.

From birth, I had a gift: I could see the emotions of the people around me radiating off of their bodies like a wet stench. The thing is each emotion had a different color: Red was anger, Green was Envy of course, and Gold well that was pure ecstasy. I always would grab whatever was closest, be it Crayons or oil paint and I draw as if I was in a trance, my friends who saw me actually compared me to that Rhino character from the Spider Man comic: you know, my whole attention focused on that one thing, not noticing anything else in the world around me. I always lost track of time when I was paint- no, creating, but I was told my longest painting was two days straight. The funny part is when I did it as a child all the people said I was autistic or something, trying to ‘cure’ me of my ‘disability’, hah, they were trying to make me fit in so they could maintain power.

After running away at 17, I practiced my craft on the streets for a good thirty years. I painted life into the cities I stayed in, the murals I left behind would capture the true essence of the city, and those plebian masses would stare in awe of it while the authorities lost nights of sleep over the fear the sheep could think for themselves. Then my gift began to leave me: around my forty-eighth birthday my eyes began to fail and my ‘friends’, against my objections mind you, took me to one of those conformist doctors who thought I was sick, he said whatever I had been doing ‘fried the cones and rods’ in my eyes so I would eventually lose my sight. I laughed, calling him out for what he was and his lust to stop my artwork, that I could see his true motives. I continued painting, having to force myself to paint for an hour where I used to freely stand out in the freezing rain all night as I worked. Now…… the only color I see is black, if you can even call it that. I just sit at the home my traitorous ‘friends’ locked me up in, staring at the empty void as I hear murmurs of sympathy from the lowly masses who admired me decades earlier. I can hear the nurse bringing me the ‘medicine’ and I knock it away with a wild flailing of my arms, I refuse to submit to the power that has already taken everything else from me.