Firelight

When she fell out of love with her husband, the artist painted darkness—black canvases with stark trees and cold moons, tired travelers on roads that led nowhere, their lights outgunned by the gloom. After her divorce she painted wide fields of young flowers. She painted snow when her mom died, haggard vultures when her dad remarried someone young and trashy, and fireworks over a gleaming city when he came to his senses with his finances intact. 

When the artist met someone from far away who seemed promising, she stared at a blank canvas in the afternoon light of her studio and couldn’t see what to paint. She made the first strokes of a chapel with its bells in mid-swing, but felt foolish, and whited over it. A couple hand in hand on a charming street in the rain, smeary lights, gorgeous colors, very Parisian—whited out. Then the sun coming up over a landscape, a new-day feeling, but it wasn’t yearning enough, and anyway, she thought, how reasonable was it to want someone so far away?

Finally, after a long phone conversation in which the man expressed an interest in meeting and she felt relief and fear all at once, she painted a dark forest path, a path full of obstacles. But up ahead, warm firelight through the trees, a clearing in which there could be anything. 

Friends who saw it said it was, strangely, the most hopeful thing she’d ever painted.