Urban System in America-Chapter 134 - 133: ONE

The next journey... It began with a gust of wind. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com

Not the kind that blows from the lungs of gods— a cool breeze or turns pages of prophecy. No — this was real wind. Gritty. Smelling of sweat and smoke and wet soil, dragging dry leaves across cobblestones, nudging at torn posters on brick walls, stirring the smell of rust, soot, and wet linen. The distant clink of a broken lantern swinging from a rusted hook.

He stood in the middle of a forgotten street.

There were no studios here. No velvet drapes. No golden frames. Just sagging roofs and crooked chimneys. Iron shutters bent like broken limbs. The air was stale. A gray sky hovered above, neither storming nor clar, just heavy— like it was mourning something unspoken.

It looked like the kind of place color had abandoned.

He was a bit confused, due to the sudden change in environment, he looked around trying to find some clues.

And that’s when he saw him.

A man in a fraying coat — maybe yellow, once— sleeves fraying, elbows patched with mismatched cloth. Now splotched with paint and dust and rain. He sat...no—hunched on a broken stool at the corner of an alley, facing a crooked easel.. His brush danced furiously across a canvas balanced precariously on bricks.

His beard was scruffy. Hat sun-washed. Eyes tired, sunken, but blazing — blazing with something feral. Something beautifully unhinged.

Vincent van Gogh.

No matter how ignorant he was about all the painting, art and stuff, there’s no way he wouldn’t recognize him... Vincent van Gogh. Father of Expressionism. Painter of Light and Emotion. Sunflower Painter. Starry Night Painter.

And The man who died poor.

The man whose paintings now sold for millions, even hundred of millions.

No matter who uncultured a man, there’s no way he hadn’t seen Starry Night once in his life.

But here — in this worn, forgotten street — he was no legend. He was just a ghost of color, trying to make the world feel something.

He didn’t notice Rex at first. His fingers were trembling around a brush, moving in jagged rhythms. The canvas was a swirl of gray, umber, and sickly green, shaped into the outline of a man sleeping against a wall.

But the man wasn’t sleeping. He was passed out, mabe dead — bottle beside him, ribs showing through his shirt.

Rex stepped closer. Van Gogh finally looked up and smiled with cracked lips.

"Ah. Bonjour. You’re not from here, are you?"

Rex didn’t answer, or maybe he couldn’t. Something in his throat locked.

Van Gogh didn’t mind, instead he smiled — not wide, not confident, but quiet, like someone who smiled more for others than himself.

"Not many people stop to look," he added. "They pass by, you see. Especially when you paint ugliness. But it’s not ugliness. It’s life."

"You can sit if you want," Vincent said. "But I haven’t got another stool."

"And be careful not to lean on the box. The oil leaks."

Rex obeyed. He sat on a cobblestone beside the artist and watched as the brush danced — not gracefully, but desperately — over the canvas.

Vincent muttered as he worked, not like he was telling a story, but like someone who was just venting.

"They told me to stop. Told me no one would buy a sky with yellow in it. Said skies are blue." He scoffed. "Idiots. The sky’s never just blue."

He mixed the paint with his fingers, not delicately — but like a man clawing for life.

Then he stopped and wiped his hands on his coat.

"Do you see it?" he asked.

Rex looked. Swirls of sky, a roof barely clinging to its chimney. A crooked cat tail vanishing down a drainpipe. And beneath a man laid on the street. Every stroke frantic and intimate, like a confession.

Time continued to pass, Van Gogh was completely immersed in the painting and Rex, in his way of painting.

After what felt like both a fleeting moment and an eternity, Vincent finally put down his brush. His shoulders sagged. His knees cracked as he stood — slowly, like a man waking from a long, fevered dream. He stared at the canvas before him, breathing in the silence that followed the storm of colors.

But then he looked to the side and paused.

Rex was still there. Kneeling. Motionless. Eyes wide, as if the painting had pierced something deep inside him. He wasn’t just looking — he was seeing.

His breath stuck in his throat.

His eyes stung.

He felt seen.

Truly, deeply seen — for the first time in his life.

All the years of loneliness, rejection, ridicule — of painting in hunger, in madness, in obscurity — all of it surged up inside him like a tide he couldn’t stop.

His lips trembled.

And then the tears came.

Soft, steady, unstoppable.

The sound of a quiet, stifled sob broke through the stillness, gently tugging Rex from his reverie.

He blinked, dazed, and looked up — only to find Vincent weeping. Not loudly, not dramatically. Just... quietly unraveling.

Tears streamed down his weathered face, carving paths through paint and dirt and time.

Rex jumped up in alarm, heart tightening.

"Vincent — what’s wrong? Are you hurt? Are you okay?"

Vincent shook his head, his fingers trembling as he wiped at his face with the frayed sleeve of his coat. The gesture was clumsy, childlike, almost ashamed.

"No," he whispered. "No, it’s okay."

He exhaled — a long, fragile breath — and looked at Rex with eyes overflowing with something deeper than joy, heavier than grief.

"I just... I think all my pain, all my hard work... it was worth it," he said. His voice cracked. "If even one person could feel what I’m painting... could understand it, even for a moment... then maybe... maybe that’s enough."

Rex stood frozen, his own chest tightening until he could barely breathe. A lump formed in his throat, thick and unmoving. His vision blurred as emotion swelled — not from pity, but from overwhelming respect and sorrow.

Because standing in front of him was not just an artist.

This was a man who had given everything — his sanity, his body, his years — for beauty no one had wanted to see.

He remembered — remembered too well — the brutal irony:

That this man, this gentle, tormented soul despite creating over 2,000 artworks, including around 900 paintings, had just sold a single painting in his whole lifetime.

One.

Rex blinked hard, but the tears slipped down anyway.

They stood there together — a century apart in spirit, but bound by something unspoken — in silence thick with shared pain.

Two men in a broken street.

One canvas between them.

And thus began the strangest, most painful, most human Chapter of his journey.

(End of Chapter)