There is a fine line between existence and non-existence. It is microscopic beyond measure, yet it can take billions of years to cross.

  A gap too wide to leap, too deep to swim. A chasm beyond the mind of man to understand.

  Yet so infinitesimally small that none have ever seen it. And none ever will. So small that were it right before your eyes it would fall beneath your notice.

  I crossed it once.

  To pin down when, why, or how would be too much to ask, but I know in my soul that I was not always the way I am now.

  When did I start to think of myself as alive? Or indeed when did I begin to think at all?

  Where first did I breathe my first breath, and taste the life within?

  How was it that I came to be?

  Whatever the reason, the fact remains…

  I Am.

  ______

  The soft swish of a brush fills the noontide air.

  A page is set awash in the light of the setting sun as colors flow like a winding river

  This indeed must be life

  The subtle breaths of a master, reveling in the beauty of finest art

  As their wrist flicks across their canvas

  This indeed must be life

  The soft pounding of a slow steady heart

  Slowing further still as their time draws ever nearer

  This indeed must be life…

  A single tear falls. The only blot on a work of immeasurable beauty

  The evening bell tolls as the sun sets on an empty home devoid of the breath of life

  This indeed… is life

  To live

  To die

  To know

  This indeed. Is life

  _____

  My master gave me the name mencholy.

  She would mix flowers with poison to make her paints. A miserable reflection of how she saw herself.

  A poisoned flower.

  As she painted me she would speak as though she knew I could hear.

  Tales of her life before her husband, how good it was, and oh, how she hated him…

  For years she suffered through the abuse. Taking soce in her paintings until her husband took that too away…

  When he took her paints, she made her own from poison and flowers.

  when he took her brush she made another from her severed hair.

  When he took her canvas, she would carve the ink upon her own skin. Marring the only part of her that this evil man “loved”.

  During her final days her husband had taken her paints again, and dug up her flower beds, that she would make no more.

  She finished my painting with her own blood.

  As she painted, her memories would flow through the mismatched ink. Over time I learned who she was. And who I was.

  She had been with child once. An unlucky hit during yet another of her husband's drunken rampages had taken that life away.

  She broke that day. She began to paint her own soul away. And though I do not condone it, the act gave me life.

  She did not let herself cry till her final moment. When she looked upon my finished work and saw herself… as she would never again be. That one tear held the name she gave me.

  Mencholy.

  I was her suffering made manifest. But I was also her hope through that suffering.

  I was the whole and sum of her pain. But she also saw me as the daughter she had lost.

  She loved Me. And as much so, I too loved and pitied her.

  On the day she died I inherited the sum total of all she was, and all that she had left. Her will lived within the ink that made my form.

  And within that will and within the ink and blood.

  I moved.

  For the first time ever, I moved as my own being, by my own will. And what was that movement?

  It is embarrassing to say. But I simply held my master for a moment. Holding her in the embrace she had often held me with while I still lived within the canvas.

  I pced her within my painting. The memory within me told me it was the only burial I could give her that mattered.

  Then I spoke, with a voice so reminiscent of her own.

  “Rest well master. I will carry on for you. In your name and in your memory, and by your will. I promise”

  SorisBckwinter