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The tips of my fingers are green. My palms are covered exclusively in the pallet of nature. Green, blue, yellow, brown, red. They are its canvas. The green has spread from my fingertips to my lower arms with time. Not entirely covering them, only appearing in spots. There are more green spots than there are of the other colors, but that makes sense, as I would consider green the color of nature. Logically, there is a lot of blue as well. But, very little red. The red is the scarlet flowers distributed throughout the field surrounding me, beneath me. Just as they are on my arms, they are small, distinctive, and notable. My hands. And my canvas. They live amidst the greenery of tall grass and buttercups. I can't help but wonder if they feel out of place. I feel as though I would. The red flowers, for which I have no name, are well spread across the field. They stand solitary, in what I only can describe as a field of green, drowning in the tall grass. How can one see themself in a lone flower? For that, I have no wise answer. Only that, while I paint the single flecks of red on the almost all-green canvas, I surrender to their loneliness.
I look up to the field. There they are, the red flowers. Some right in front of my eyes and others in my rearview. I could probably count them all. There aren't that many, possibly a hundred. I won’t, of course. I am far too lazy for such chores. Instead, I continue scattering blush on the paper at random. Where I feel it is empty, where it could use some color. Since the painting is no masterpiece to speak of, the precision of the details is marginal. There is nothing of value to ruin. The real grass is more sun-kissed than that I could imitate with a brush. I tried to contour the strands with a shade of yellow to illustrate the shadow of the sunrays on the grass, but it looks splotchy. The trees are unproportionate and the sky appears dull. However, I believe that nothing but the eyes of the observer can fully grasp the grace of the world. I glance down to my right, at Lily's painting of the same view. It looks so very different from my own, yet just as different from real life as mine does.
I catch sight of a green strand of hair glimpse in my rearview. Brimming with fright, I ferociously scan my clothing for any paint stains. Now I question why my morning self stupidly chose to wear white linen shorts. While I don't spot any paint, I’m certain the grass is staining them to compensate for my surprising precision of working paintbrush. However, the bliss of ignorance is sweet enough to avoid actually looking at my seating. Perhaps I’m flourishing in luck today, I think sweetly. The strand of green in my hair was just a mishap in my roaring serendipity. I set my paint book to the side to try to drag, scratch, and press (and unfortunately fail to remove) the color from my hair.
Lily places her painting to her side, on the grass between our bodies. "What are you doing," Lily says, with a tone that a stranger would assume mocking. I know that she wouldn't offend me, nor would she hurt me intentionally. So, I respond casually, "I got paint in my hair."
It fell quiet after that. As I'm readjusting my seat, trying to get comfortable, she is laying down on her back while examining the clear sky through the branches of the tree behind us. I retrieved my book and started reading. Intently. As intently as I could with the wind wailing and the birds chirping in what seemed to be circles above my head. I had barely registered the melodies before now.
"I still haven’t watched the second movie, you know," Lily says from nowhere. My brain doesn’t register what she's referring to. I can almost feel the wheels spinning, and spinning, for a few seconds before I understand that she's looking at the cover of my book. Her head is fully turned to me, laying in her gentle hands, towards my very own more rugged ones. I turn the book over to stare at it. "You should." I tell her that it’s even better than the first one. She says that she’ll consider it. I quietly accept that answer as a win. Then we enter the state of that familiar peaceful coexistence again. Where the sound of the air itself is as adequate as laughter because voices and conversation are redundant to the comfort and understanding between the two souls sitting in the stillness of only them.
There we sit, mostly in silence. When I have something to say, I do. She does the same, but there is no actual conversation. What seems like random sentences and words flying out of our mouths at what may appear to be arbitrary times, aren't. In reality, we divulge each others inner workings. Share and consume each other. That does sound more vulgar than I intended. We try to close the bridge between our separate thinking. Telling each other whatever we want, however redundant it may seem to an observer. Nothing is truly random or really irrelevant to the brain. However odd the matter of the brain may seem, there is always a train of thought to follow where it derived from. The act of granting others a look into the inner works of the most intricate and singular part of oneself is to spread oneself bare. You lay nude. I think so, at least. How I think is all I am, it's what I am. It's the most personal and authentic part of ourselves. So, when I now tell her that "I wish that I was the moon," I might as well wear no pants. Nevertheless, she can't know why I do. Why do I wish to switch places with an inanimate object (can one call the moon that)? Yes, she can assume or even ask, but she doesn't know. My thoughts are much more intricate than the grain that I share. She is unaware of my longing for that true tranquility and the avoidance (freedom) of the sun, the light. So when I interrupt her very own string of thoughts, she can guess. "Yes, you do remind me of the moon," she says in one quiet breath, and after a few beats of silence she follows up to say, "I just thought of what it’d be like to be a bird." Now I do too. That's how we share ourselves. How we integrate ourselves. She doesn’t lay her full brain's memoir bare for me but shares a part of herself. As I did a few seconds earlier.
"I think it's time to, Remus. We're probably gonna be covered in ticks if we stay for even longer."
It had been hours. We stand up.