The city park wasn’t giving her any inspiration either.

She’d spent the weekend hunting down places that lofty blogs on the internet swore would hold any artist’s eyes captive. To her dismay, she soon found it to be nothing but a smothering tourist trap. The cherry blossoms were duller than the pictures said, the backwaters were grey and the promised wildflowers were all wilted and brown.

At this point, all she wanted was to get her driver's license already so she could drive around aimlessly whilst listening to Elliot Smith and have her own Charlie moment so that she too could feel “infinite”, even for a little while. 

Painting had always been Aurora’s passion, ever since she was three and had gotten her hands on half-used wax crayons during summer break. Even twenty minutes of finger painting or dabbing emerald green flower petals with soap paint in the bathtub or doodling with coloured chalk on the sidewalk reflected her undying passion.

But none of that seemed to mean anything in the present, where she sat in a congested coffee shop on a side street. Sixteen years of passion for art, four years of studying it, and two years in a dead-end job of making caricatures had left her with nothing to show for her hard work but the canvas in a bag at her feet.

“Would you like another cappuccino, ma’am?”

A friendly voice snapped Aurora out of her reverie, and she shifted in her wooden chair to face the waitress. She was pretty, with spikey short hair and wore a nose piercing that was hard to miss. Aurora was sure that she had vexed the waitress by sitting in her place for hours, which was fair, she thought, because of how many people were waiting outside to enter the cafe, brimming with life. The waitress was kind and maintained her professionalism in dealing with Aurora, who apologised and finally got up and walked towards the exit.

The sun was starting to set by the time Aurora moved away from the teeming city, deciding to walk for two kilometres to her house. She was pondering whether or not she should hike down to the lake to paint a picture of the sunset. She snickered at the very thought, after allowing it to reside on her mind not more than a quick few seconds. She hadn’t resorted to taking photos of cliche sunsets since she was a teen. It was still intriguing, though. Before she could talk herself out of it, she hailed down a taxi.

Usually, when she looked at sunsets, she noticed how the sun changed the sky. The sun set, the colours became more vivid, darker and darker until her eyes were capable of seeing the outer space the way it truly was; an infinite mass of pitch-black starred void. 

The sun was leaning down to kiss the earth’s lips, it got closer and closer to the top of the little mountain standing in front of her. She could still not mark any changes in the sky. But suddenly, as she heard Michael’s voice, she turned around to look at him and noticed. She noticed how the sun caressed his porcelain skin with a soft orange undertone. There was this hyper-awareness in herself, the world and all things breathing that bothered me, unsettled her to the very core. And she forgot how to breathe for a second.

“This isn’t real,” she muttered.

Michael didn’t reply.

She blinked her eyes a couple of times as the wind blew her slick ponytail making it stick to the left side of her neck. She chewed on her lower lip as she tried to hold back the tears that welled up in her eyes.

Michael was gone.