Snapshots

Yellow

Hayden leaned forward in the creaky, metal folding chair, resting his chin in his hand and his elbow on his knee. He tap-tap-tapped the toe of his sneaker on the tile floor of Maddie's studio. He liked to keep her company in the studio when he wasn't working at the auto shop; he admired how smart she was for getting accepted into art school and how dedicated she was to her work. "I don't get it."

Maddie turned to face him as she rubbed her paintbrush on a square of paper towel. "Don't get what?"

"The painting. What is it?"

"Oh! It's a piece expressing how I felt when we had our first kiss," she said. She dipped her brush in the yellow paint on her palette and began dancing the brush around on the canvas.

Hayden remembered that kiss. They were at the movie theatre seeing Star Wars and spent the whole movie awkwardly linking fingers over the popcorn bucket. It wasn't until the credits started rolling that he worked up the courage to lean in, but it was still dark, and he kissed Maddie's eyelid instead. She didn't miss a beat. She turned and placed a small hand on his cheek before pressing her soft lips against his, and Hayden knew that even Luke Skywalker never felt as wonderful as he did then.

He stared at the painting. He saw swipes of pinks, flecks of red, and gusts of yellow. But no Maddie. No Hayden. No kissing. Not even a kernel of buttered popcorn. "I still don't get it. I don't see either of us."

"It's abstract; it's not supposed to be realistic."

Hayden straightened his back and stretched his arms. "Then how is anyone going to understand it?"

"By looking at it." Maddie grabbed a tube of orange paint and squeezed out an amount the size of a pea, mixing it in with the yellow. "Someone will look at it and feel something."

"Yeah, if by 'something' you mean 'confused.'"

Maddie sighed and rubbed her forehead, leaving a yellow smudge above her left eyebrow. "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"

Haydn held up his hands defensively. "I'm not doing anything, honest. I just don't get how anyone will see anything meaningful in a bunch of random colors smudged on a canvas."

"But they're not random. They're intentional." Maddie's paintbrush started moving slower, its bright yellow dance morphing into more of a mustard-tinted trudge.

"How?" Haydn leaned back in his metal folding chair, hearing it creak in response.

Maddie sighed again, heavier this time. "I don't know how to explain it. I guess I just place colors wherever they feel right," she said.

"That doesn't make sense to me."

"It's because you're thinking about it too much."

Hayden's fingers grabbed at his brown curls. His mouth opened and closed, ready to say words he hadn't quite thought of yet. "How am I supposed to know that you're painting a picture about our first kiss if I don't think about it?"

Maddie rubbed her fingers into the paper towel. "Because," she said, "it's not about knowing. It's about feeling. Someone may not ever know what inspired me to paint this, but the colors and brushstrokes will stir up certain emotions that make them feel a similar way to how I did when creating it."

Hayden shrugged and tilted his head to one side. "I still don't get it."

"I'm not sharing a scenario. I'm sharing an emotion."

"Why?"

"Why?" Maddie slammed her brush onto the palette. It bounced and clattered onto the floor, splattering paint on the tile and her shoes. She turned to face him, her cheeks and ears tinged with pink. "Why? Because that's what art is! That's the whole point! It's not about making little pictures and making sure everyone knows what's what. It's about sharing human emotion, sharing something that can't be expressed through words, sharing something that others can relate to, even if they don't quite know why." She bent forward to retrieve the paintbrush. She wiped the bristles on the paper towel, dipped them in more yellow paint, and continued working.

Hayden's gaze followed the brush as it moved across the canvas in a soft and rhythmic motion, almost like two lips locked in a kiss. His chest swelled with warmth whenever he thought back to that night.

"Huh. I've never thought about it like that."

"Well, try it." Maddie reached for her tube of purple paint. "A lot of things might start making more sense to you."