My friend Noah fell in love with a girl who painted.

He said they met at a coffee shop somewhere in Austin. A placid bunker run by an aged man who liked Reggae and drank scotch.

Noah said her laughter was like a candle in a small room at the centre of a snowstorm of nostalgia, happiness and regret.

Sometime soon after, Noah disappeared.

He didn’t return my calls or reply to my texts. He wasn’t on social media. We didn’t have common friends. And I didn’t know where he worked.

All I knew was where he lived.

So two weeks after Noah disappeared, I went to his residence in Staggerbrush road.

Noah’s flat was one of six double-room apartments in a peaceful old barn some five minutes walk from the bus stand.

The door was unlocked, but Noah wasn’t home.

I entered and sat on an armchair. I imagined Noah sitting on it, alone except for a cigarette, and the occasional passing vehicles.

 The next day I went to the coffee-shop, took a seat by the counter, and ordered an espresso.

The girl next to me sipped from a mug and stared at the flow of life bleeding from a single, half-open window. 

“Um, have we met before?” I asked.

She chuckled.

She said her name was Kiera.

We talked about art, and coffee, and life in general. 

We drove a conversation down a river of espresso, and let quietnesses swell with the talk of others - tramps playing music with tattered guitars, old women neglected by their children - until it was just the two of us and a dusty piano, sorting its way through a haze of cigarette smoke and faint memories.

When I asked about Noah, Kiera shook her head.

“It’s like he just disappeared,” she said, “and I don’t know when he’s coming back.”

“She grew up in Minnesota,” the barista said. “She moved here to study painting.”

“Oh?”

He nodded.

The barista said Kiera couldn’t get used to studying art in a conventional way. She wanted to refrain from having to interpret it or dig into it for more profound meaning. 

“She wants to paint bright and happy. Simple and elegant, lost in the act of capturing lives in splashes of blended colour.”

His coffee-shop struck me as a gathering place for the lost with a shared sense of despair, away from the chaos and tragedy of the city, where nostalgia hung in the air with the music. It was a world between black and white, but that was the comfort of it. A comfort I was uncomfortable with.

One twilit evening, I asked Kiera why she painted.

“At times, you know,” she said, “I witness something in people, in places. Like a drug, or a life, or a sensation. I don’t quite have the words to describe it to you. The closest you’ll ever find an answer to it is when you see me paint.”

“And I know you told Noah the same thing, right?”

She pondered for a moment.

“How did you know?”

“Because that’s why he fell in love with you,” I said.

And I realised at that moment, it was why I had, too.

”When did you start painting?” I asked.

“My father gave me my very first watercolour set when I was six. It was a set of twelve colours I still prominently remember, much to my own surprise,” she smiled, “but it was how everything started”

The following evening, she gave me a package.

“What is this for?” I asked, marginally startled.

“It’s a painting that I wanted to give to Noah, but I want you to take it now.”

“You can still give it to him when he comes back…” I stammered, unsure about the fact if he ever will.

“No, this is for you now, not him.”

 The painting was of two silhouettes standing under a translucent umbrella; one of them in bright sunny colours, the other in charcoal, just black and white, with a hint of blue. They were shrouded in long overcoats and thick mufflers, marvelling at falling autumn leaves.

I thought of how wonderful it might feel to experience a moment of complete release. The simple erasure of everything that was, is and could be. I put my head in the heart of a stranger, hopeless and broken, and I thought of that single moment of weightlessness, as I stared at the painting.

The next day, I found out Noah had died. His landowner told me when I tried to visit his apartment again.

He was hit by a goods truck while riding his bicycle on his way back from the grocery store. 

I thought of a mangled body and a battered bicycle on an autumn afternoon. Of spilt vegetables, torn clothes, scattered coins on the sidewalk and dripping red blood on the street. 

And for whatever reason, I thought of a watercolour painting.

I wept.

When I told Kiera, it felt like she already knew. She nodded and stared up at the smog outside.

“I’ll miss him,” she said.

When I was about to leave, Kiera walked with me up the stairs. We watched the tender rain fall upon the busy Austin avenue.

“Don’t come back here,” she said.

“Why would you say that?”

“This place is not for you. It’s for people who lose what they can’t get back.”

“And you?”

“I lost Noah,” she said, looking at her feet. “I lost your friend. And his reminiscences is the colour of my muse now.”

She kissed me lightly on the lips and stared deeply into my eyes.

“But you still carry him with you,” she said. “And you always will.”

And when I think of Noah, I think of a painting of two silhouettes standing under the shade of an umbrella park in autumn; one of them in colour, one in black and white.

And I wonder which one is me.