Chapter Text
When the painter is drunk, he starts to believe that he is in love with the world.
“Can you see it?” he says. “Don’t you see it too? Everything is perfect. Everything is completely and exactly as it should be.”
“I can’t see anything,” the man without a dog says.
“I can barely see you.”
When the painter is particularly drunk, he lies more fervently than ever:
he says he knows
the names of all the stars in the sky,
he says he’s eaten the hearts of men,
he says
he has lived a thousand lives
and remembers each.
“I was once a lion, I was once a jackal, I was a king, I was a prophet.
I have held the hands of the most beautiful people.
I have slept on the most luxurious beds.
I have known love,”
he says. “I loved and
was loved.
The man without a dog believes him, he always does.
he smiles when
the painter tells him that
Death is not real.
“I don’t think I have it in me to love
anyone,”he says.
“But I would like to be loved. I would like
to be loved.”
The painter is nothing more than a collection of holes and cravings.
He is a want that has forgotten the word “enough.”
The painter doesn’t like the way he looks.
He wants to be taller, sometimes he wants to be shorter.
He never likes the haircut he has, he never likes the clothes he wears.
Nothing he does is ever perfect, he knows this.
He thinks of himself as a failed creation.
“I used to be much more handsome than
this,”he says to the man without a dog.
“When I was young, I was not like this at
all.”
He believed
he was the only two men in the world, and that
he had no befores or afters, and that
he was fixed in space, in a kind of eternity,
in a kind of shock.