Chapter Seventy-One: The End of Loneliness
Her words made me feel an irrepressible loneliness, I felt that there were only two of us in the world who were pitying for ourselves, the only person I knew in this city, the only person I could hug was her, and when we didn't speak, I felt that I was the only one left in the whole world.
I know that I was in a city from the past, when I had a friend, a job, a neighbor, and I was left alone.
I went back to the dug up half of the room by myself, bringing back the three only real objects that could connect me to the city, I slept alone in the leaky half of the room, with the dark night sky above my head, and the sea breeze brushing my face across two kilometers of coastline, and I had never felt so uncontrollably lonely at such a moment.
And at this moment, especially when the faint sound of whistles and cars came from the window, I felt more and more that I was walking on a dark road with no end in a knife-like loneliness.
I wanted to make this loneliness disappear by drawing, so I got up from bed and told her it was time to work.
We went back to painting, we were all wearing a bowl, and she no longer wore a blanket when she was resting.
During the painting, we rarely spoke, and I asked her to stay in shape as much as possible, because talking would interrupt my or her thoughts about the moment.
When my mind returned from the painting to her bowl, she would smile at my changing bowl, and then let her bowl relax completely, waiting for me to approach.
I put down my paintbrush and approached her, and that environment itself was the best catalyst, triggering our most sensitive|and longing nerves at every moment, without any auxiliary movements and preparations.
I even pressed her and started looking for the feeling of death until I came back to life and returned to painting.
We go back and forth, between death and painting, forgetting hunger, forgetting time. By the time we were finally finished, we had been in the room for thirty-five hours, and I had put down my brush fifty-seven times, thirteen of which I had put down my brush and walked over to her bowl.
As if that is the only way that I can forget and not feel lonely. The last time we were on the couch in the living room, when the painting was completely finished, she said she wanted to go to the living room and feel the different light.
She dragged me to the couch in the living room, and we didn't care that the curtains were just drawn, and it was likely that someone would see it from another building, and she wanted to enjoy the feeling of the sun shining on both of them at the same time.
When we finished our last sublimation in the sun, I kept thinking of Qiu Pei's figure in my mind - not fantasizing about her, but feeling that she was looking at me from some corner.
I had to tell my model to change the bowl position, and I leaned against the sofa and hugged her to see all the corners of the living room, alleviating my feeling of weakness, but the feeling was still there, and at the same time, I heard the sound of the piano playing the Waltz, intermittently, and sometimes it came and went, I thought it was a hallucination, but finally it became more and more obvious, until I could not hold it anymore and fell asleep on the sofa for a day and a night.
When I was woken up by my model, there were only eight hours left before the return flight took off. I thought back to the hallucinations I had before I fell asleep, and the images of Qiu Pei and the sound of Waltz were so real that I was eager to let this feeling stay.