Elias.
Tall, unshaven, paint on his knuckles, and an easy kind of charisma that made you forget how to breathe. He was showcasing a few of his surrealist paintings—lush dreamscapes that seemed to live and breathe. I paused in front of one, caught in a trance, when a voice came from beside me.
“What do you think?”
I turned. “It’s like a memory I never knew I had. It’s…beautiful.”
He smiled. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said all night.”
We talked for hours after that.
Elias didn’t care for flash or status. He lived in a cramped studio full of canvases and smelled like turpentine half the time. He didn’t own a car. Our dates consisted of street tacos, late-night walks, and sketching each other on napkins.
