She makes me want to be a painter. She makes me acutely aware of my inability to paint. Every time I see her I wish I had a brush, a canvas, palette and colours with which I could record her for posterity. Something about her is ethereal and something about her is tragic. She looks so sad it makes my heart want to cry, to cradle her in my arms and wipe all her future tears away. I met her some months ago. She is one of my students' girlfriend and her name is Peace. Perhaps, there is truly something about her that is at peace and there is also something about her that is chaotic...She stopped attending classes at her university, a teachers' college, some months ago and had to be hospitalized for, what I suspect was, psychiatric care. She came dressed in a short Qi Pao, that loveliest of sexy dresses ever invented by human beings. And, the Qi Pao has now been around for over five hundred years, or so she informed me. White, with blue flowers, her dress ended a little above her stockinged knees. And from the upper thigh down it was slit down the sides and I couldn't help gaze at the creamy skin, despite my reluctance to do so. She continues to live away from home and her parents send her a few hundred kuai (RMB) every month. It's enough, she says, for her to meet her expenses. It's not enough for her wanderlust, though. She spent a few months in a town near Xi'An, the ancient capital of China, with one of her former classmates. She rented a room near his university in Xi'An and paid a mere seventy yuan a month as rent. The people there were very kind and welcoming, she informed me, more than the people in Huainan, a fact I have noticed more than once about the city where I am located. There's much I can write about her oval face, milky skin and light brown, sad eyes and dishevelled hair but all that writing would be nowhere near a patch on a painting that captured her beauty. If I were a painter, I know, I would have created a masterpiece had I painted her. 'You have painted me in your heart and that makes you a greater painter,' she spoke enigmatically when I told her of my regret... I wonder if she is right...I wonder if she thinks I have her picture in my heart...I wonder if she somehow knows more than I do... I wonder if she is a painter who can paint her own picture wherever she wants...I wonder why she looks sad... Had Leonardo Da Vanci seen her, Peace would certainly have been his Monalisa... |
