“Colour is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.”

As the universe erupted, and lives collided, we came to be. Human life was a kaleidoscope of colours, mistakes, and discoveries; it was modern art.

I was only eight years old, scrawny and little when my parent decided to take me to an art museum with them. As a pudgy baby, I loved colours, and so my parents thought it was only logical to introduce me to some of the most intricately placed colours ever.

The museum had a “modern art” section. Canvases with intricate borders and seemingly random colours adorned the walls of the hall. At first, I couldn’t see it. For me, it was something even I could have done, but as my mother had pointed out, I hadn’t.

I stood in front of the painting, and for a moment, everything was still. And then something happened, the colours stirred, dance was born. The seemingly random explosions of colour rearranged themselves; I could almost hear their hurried footsteps.

thump,
thump,
thump.

The paintings were a different reality for each of us. I could hear my tiny heart fluttering inside my chest, falling for the primordial energy on the canvas. And since then, I’ve fallen in love with a lot of things; men, women, books, and poems but my first love will always be modern art.

There was something magical about the canvas, something you don’t find often. I could see the brush strokes, some hurried and some languid. The colours intertwined with each other, a myriad of emotions. Sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet. Since then, I have come to see modern art in almost everything but most importantly, in how we came to be.

At first, there was an explosion, a collision, a prophecy. Erupting colours, flickering lights, chaos. We are humans; with technicolor stories behind our eyes and a sea of emotions in our soul. Then came the splattering drops of rain, the rage of fire. We were no longer one, colors reflected from the eyes of trillions. We found love, violence, and fear. Every emotion was a different stroke on the canvas of the universe.

And one day, a mad civilization arose, intertwining us further. A mighty wallop of ideas, the ache to create something new, to stand out. We made mistakes, and we made discoveries. We hid our mistakes with hurried and haggard strokes of our brush. Never to be seen.

Soon, we forgot that our initials are not carved into anything immortal, Forgetting that we did not make the painting, but the painting made us. The sun does not shine for us, and the earth does not feel our footsteps. Time does not wait for us because it isn’t for us.

We are a kaleidoscope of emotions, mistakes, and desires. We have nothing expected of us, just like the paintings that adorn the halls of the museum. We are a beautiful, colorful mess.

Who knew modern art was an age-old love story?