When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

There is nothing worse than silence, in a moment after. Ask a woman who’s just given birth. Ask a father who saw a wagon tip and is running, calling out names. Ask a daughter whose mother didn’t make it into the shelter, because of her. Silence screams loudest of all.

She is also a woman who can’t look away from the singed curl of a rose petal on a hot day, the valley of skin in the fold of a hand, or the shine on the curve of a dog’s back. What people find mundane or ordinary or even unappealing—she’s fascinated by all of it.

Do not dwell. Head down, feet forward, don’t think. And so we pull the blanket of numbness tight around our shoulders, August says.

Be angry, not guilty.”

Anger is something she’s only started to embrace. To be angry, you must feel. You must grasp the magnitude of loss or injustice—and she’s not ready for that. Not completely. Not yet.

Bombs and guns and starvation are obvious killers, but what loneliness does simply takes longer.

War is a mesh of dark scents—the rotting eggs of gunpowder, the sweet burn of an oak wagon on fire, that heart-stopping iron bite of blood.

Explain your sympathy to the sheep, her father once said, after she cried when he’d shot a rare lynx that killed their lamb. What he didn’t understand was that she’d cried for both of them, but mostly for all the horrible necessity in life, for the fact that needing to eat for one meant death to the other.

It makes no sense that the thought of plants being destroyed matters, but it’s the fact that they are only here because she asked them to be that wedges within her. For them to be destroyed because she’d encouraged them to live where they should not breaks her heart.

Learning he’s an artist has intensified his attractiveness,

“I agree with that,” he finally says. “But when you paint, you’re alone with yourself, and I don’t want to be alone with myself.” A pause. “There was a man I killed, who was smiling because in his last moments, he thought he saw his mother. If I painted, every face would be his.”

But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong.

Life is made of layers, and artists need to be aware of those layers. Everything is informed by what came before.

For once, I did my best, but I’ll have you know, all I wanted to do was my very worst.

A rush. Not just from having something in common with someone, when usually she’s the odd one out, but from the chance that he might even appreciate the way she sees the world.

“I keep thinking about what you said last night. You think like an artist. That’s not wrong. Being different is not wrong. It’s interesting. If it wasn’t, we’d all paint the same thing and see the world the same way and there’d be no movement, and no chance at understanding.”

you’re either an artist who does their art or one who doesn’t. And there might be a price for doing it, but I’ll tell you there’s a greater price for not.”

“Depends on what that belief makes you do. If it doesn’t hurt someone, then why not? But if you relinquish responsibility, in the name of your belief, then I say it’s a wrong packaged as a right.”

She wanted to defend her favorite artists. She wanted to explain the relief from seeing that lifting from reality was not only all right, but could actually enhance a world that sometimes needed enhancing.

But Evelien likes to imagine it true, that if even briefly, the world had suddenly understood true value and gone desperately mad for flowers.

When I almost fainted, my world broke into a Seurat.

“It’s too bad we’re not able to be friends with our parents before becoming their children, isn’t it?”

There are some who need God to be good, because their morality comes from being watched, August has said. Those people are dangerous the second they stop believing.

The colors of the water, he’d said of the painting that’s before her. They’re whites and grays and green and ochre, but very little blue. Nothing is simple, Evelien. Never be one of those people who just thinks the ocean’s blue.

All she sees is the painting and it is everything—bright in a muted room, elation in the midst of despair. Hope and promise and creativity itself.

She knows you’re not supposed to touch the surface of a painting, but she has. In a tiny corner, just to feel the brushstrokes and intention, to be struck with a moment in time, one motion of an artist’s hand. The urge, the yearning to get closer, she knows it well.

take big, selfish gulps of air when you can, because they are never guaranteed.

“My dear, we may have borrowed you for a little while, but you belong only to yourself.”

What is it to be a mother, who knows that to save her child, she must lose her? To have the greatest gift be a future you will never be a part of? A future without, but because.