Chapter Text
Jeanelle Vaerine wasn’t a human.
Even though she could seem like one – when her long wavy hair, dyed hazel was getting caught in an autumn wind. When she played the violin, her graceful hands holding the instrument with such human acceptance. Her irises were in the colour of coffee - the type of brown that would not sparkle nor turn golden in the warm sunlight. No, they were dark, always seemed slightly too big, compared to the fragile features of her face.
Jeanelle was a woman. Especially in the morning, when she was drinking black tea at five o’clock – with half-asleep eyes trying to focus on the newspaper. The radio was playing some meaningless words, but it have always been enough to keep everything else quiet.
She had never felt beautiful. But sometimes she could understand why people found it hard to take their eyes off of her. The most beautiful she found herself in the pieces of a mirror that had always been staring back at her from the hallways. In her imagination, the glassy shards would splatter on the tiled floor so astonishingly, like diamonds amidst the usual dust. But as it laid there, shattered beyond repair, so painfully ordinary… she looked away, hands shaking slightly. Realization was painful, like if something was being ripped away from her soul.
She craved another kind of pain.
Her agony had different colours. On the television screen, beautiful women would paint their porcelain faces with makeup. Jeanelle painted on the canvas, smothering it in layers of heart-wrenching emptiness.
She was a woman, after all.
She carried her landscape through time, leading it slowly between the passing days. Or maybe it have been guiding her. Pictures can find their way into one’s soul if someone looks close enough.
So she had learned to close her eyes.
– Would you paint me, Elle?
– You know I can’t
– Please…
– Not now. Not while you’re still here
– Why?
Jeanelle knew how to make up her mind. But now she was hesitating. Her hand stopped before taking the paintbrush. She felt something breaking inside her. But she couldn’t fall apart. She wasn’t made to be looked at, like a mirror.
She never believed that someone could love her. Maybe that’s why it was so hard to let go of those memories. She wanted to believe that it was a right person and only the time was wrong. But have they ever been right?
When she felt those eyes on her… warm, good, known… she stopped feeling invisible. Slowly, with hesitation, her mind started to crave understanding. How she wished to be untangled by him. But she couldn’t take it. So she pulled away when he tried.
She disappeared, too quickly, as always. And maybe it did hurt a little more than she would care to admit. Maybe she felt betrayed by her own will.
– paint me, Elle – He said, before they parted ways. God, if only she could be a bit more human, she would’ve taken his hand, told him that it’s not like that… That she’ll stay. But she was only her. It wasn’t like her, to ask, to feel, to beg. She smiled
– Elle, please – she left, not able to bear hearing this nickname from him. It felt as if he was talking to someone else.
Elle would be frail, like a little teacup, painted blue. With tear-filled eyes and a lovely face. She would giggle and blush, and feel that there is something wild in her, burning like an untamed fire. She would be beautiful, painting still-life; roses on the porch with rays of sunlight shining on her body. Her spirit would be simple and small, able to fit in that tiny house made with flesh and bones and tangled nerve-endings.
She would be so… unreal.
Jeanelle had only known how to smile. So she did just that, until her face started to feel strange as if that smile was cracking the tanned surface of freckled cheeks. As if her lips were stuck in that awkward grimace of not-real-enough happiness.
But he had loved her for that smile.
– I’ve run out of red paint – she answered. Because their love was red. Crimson, like the scarf which she had obsessively worn around her neck on every meeting. It looked stunning when the soft waves of her hair would fall on the fabric. The wool was scratchy but the feeling made her mind quiet for a while as she untangled herself for those walks by the river. She couldn’t picture the good in them without the blood-like red around her neck.
If only her heart would be made out of scratchy wool.
– It doesn’t have to be in red – and so she broke apart. Silently. He could never see the world like she did.
They were falling… away from each other. And she knew she could pull them close together if she reached out her hand. And everything would seem alright again.
But she couldn’t bear to do that.
So instead, she painted him. With the cheap scarlet paint, bought in a small shop on the other side of the street, under that big oak tree. First, his hands as she tried to erase the lingering feeling of their touch. A caress, filled with sharp edges and soft curves.
She didn’t have edges nor smooth surfaces. She was tangled, like the scarf. She was a bundle of unfinished thoughts, emptiness, sweet tea with lemons and reflections. She was the smell of tea and almond-scented soap, ice on the sidewalk, snowflakes in her hair, unwanted blush, black gloves, long skirt and too-short sleeves of a white cardigan. She was eyes, her strange smile, the feeling of dissociation when the world slowly blurs away, sleepless nights, the mist above the street, the light of a lantern by the house, sunday evenings, early mornings, that one yellow rose in the garden, among her carrots. Someone said yellow flowers meant disdain. Well, she had never asked flowers for their opinion.
She was all that, woven together between the music and strings of the violin. She was so much and yet not whole…