Page 31 of I Love My Mistake

Chapter Seventeen

5:05 A.M. The Next Morning

Where am I? I feel the ache of cold cramped sleeping on a hard wood floor. I squint around me. It’s dark, all the candles long since burnt down. I fell asleep here, on the floor. I don’t remember lying down. Did I pass out? Was I drinking? No, memory tells me I wasn’t. From the dryness in my throat, I don’t think I’ve had any water, either, for way too long.

I lift myself up with both hands. One of my legs comes painfully alive, poked with invisible needles. “Ouch!” I give it a good shake, but really, you can’t rush waking it.

I’m scared to look up on the wall to see what I did. I’m really terrified.

“Come on Nicole, put on your big-girl pants and look up.”

I draw my head up slowly; my eyes are used to the darkness now, enough to where I can see my painting. As I take it in, I start to sob the type of wracking sobs that don’t want an audience, because they aren’t pretty. The tears are of disbelief, joy and a sublime fulfillment I have never before known. My heart feels like it’s expanding, like it’s bursting through my ribcage and will fill up the whole room. I finally did it. I finally painted something worth looking at. I finally painted from my soul and not my mind.

I’m kneeling, staring at it. My tear-streamed vision is foggy and blurred, but still I can see that it’s the most beautiful piece of art I have ever hoped to produce. It’s exactly what I’ve been blocked against. Exactly what I was afraid to do. Exactly what I fought to break through to. Because it is a painting that has come from the very deepest part of myself that is only mine – my soul.

But I cannot take credit for this painting, just as I cannot take credit for my soul. This painting came from someplace else, through me. It came to express the human condition that is unrequited love and unmitigated heartbreak.

I know exactly what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to slice it into two jagged pieces and frame them, held up and spread open by pins, inside shadow-boxes, to be hung next to each other… always separate… always apart.

I will call them: Two Halves That Can Never Be One.