Urban System in America-Chapter 135 - 134: I Used To Eat Paint

After that, they didn’t speak much, they just walked, walked together, just like vagrants.

From one village to another. Not through grand streets or gardens — but through the backs of cities. Through weathered French towns with leaning roofs and walls patched with moss. From Arles to Auvers, past wilted vineyards, past cemeteries with forgotten names.

Vincent carried his easel and brushes strapped to his back like a soldier might carry his rifle. His satchel, tattered at the bottom, held half-used tubes of paint, threadbare brushes, glass jars, rags stained with years of pigment — stuffed into a satchel that was clearly once a postman’s bag.

He rarely ate.

Some days, their meal was a crust of bread left behind by a baker. On others, they survived on nothing more than stale bread and cheap wine. He poured his heart into sketches—scenes of rural life, quiet landscapes, the curve of a sleeping horse—hoping to sell them for just enough to afford a warm meal.

"I used to eat paint," Vincent said once, offhandedly, as if he were describing the weather. "The yellow. Chrome yellow. I thought maybe it would fill me with happiness."

Rex turned to him in shock, but Vincent only smiled. "Madness, they called it. But what is madness if not hope misplaced?"

Rex didn’t ask questions. He simply followed.

They slept where they could.

They slept in haylofts, beneath bridges, under broken fences, abandoned barns. The floor of a kind baker’s storeroom. And sometimes, when the night was warm and no one chased them away, under the stars with nothing but a blanket and silence.

And every morning, Vincent rose before the light, easel strapped to his back, and wandered.

Through fields, riversides, graveyards, and train stations. Anywhere the world forgot to hide its soul.

"Do you know what it’s like," Vincent said once, "to write hundreds of letters begging people to understand you — only to be called mad?"

He glanced down.

"My own father thought I was a disappointment. And my mother never hung a single painting."

Once, in a half-collapsed chapel, Vincent curled beside a shattered altar and whispered apologies to the Virgin Mary for dripping cadmium red on the pews.

He painted every day.

In wind. In rain. In delirium. In grief.

When Rex asked why — why keep painting when no one wanted it — Vincent blinked slowly.

"I only sold one, you know," he murmured. "In my whole life."

Rex stared.

"One painting," Vincent said again. "To a friend’s sister. The Red Vineyard. It went for 400 francs. Enough to buy canvas for a few months."

"She was kind. The woman who bought it. I don’t think she saw genius. I think she pitied me."

—

He talked often. But not grandly. Never with ego.

"It’s strange, you know," he said once, gently tugging paint off a cracked palette. "I sell none of these. Not one. They say I use too much yellow. Too much madness."

He grinned, toothy and sad. "But that’s all I have. Madness and yellow."

Rex watched the way Vincent mixed colors with his fingers, not just brushes. He’d press the base of his thumb against the canvas — drag it like he was scraping out pieces of his own heart. The strokes were never careful. They were trembling. Bursting.

He painted sunlight like it hurt. He painted nights that pulsed like fever dreams.

And never once did he pause to wonder whether it would sell. Whether anyone would ever see it.

Once, in a half-collapsed chapel, Vincent curled beside a shattered altar and whispered apologies to the Virgin Mary for dripping cadmium red on the pews.

He painted every day.

He painted with hunger gnawing at his stomach, with shoes so worn his toes peeked out, with fingers cracked from cold. He painted when he was sick, when he had no models, no clients, no buyers.

In wind. In rain. In delirium. In grief.

When Rex asked why — why keep painting when no one wanted it — Vincent blinked slowly.

"Art," Vincent said, crouching beside a muddy road, "is not something we give to the world.it is a reflection of it, hoping to resonate, hoping it finds its place."

---

There was a day when Vincent collapsed.

They had walked too far, with too little food. His lips cracked from dehydration, and his hands — so steady with a brush — trembled violently. Rex tried to lift him, but Vincent waved him off.

"I’m alright," he whispered, even as his face pressed into the dust.

He refused to go to a hospital.

"I’ve been in too many," he said. "They call them asylums. You paint too much, they say you’re disturbed. You don’t paint enough, they say you’re wasting talent."

His eyes fluttered open. "What if I’m just trying to stay alive?"

That night, he painted with trembling hands — a tree split by lightning, its trunk hollow, its branches ablaze with orange and cobalt.

Rex said nothing.

Because there was nothing to say.

---

Sometimes, he wrote letters.

Dozens of them. Pages and pages.

Mostly to his brother, Theo.

"I love my brother more than I know how to say," he told Rex. "He paid my rent. Fed me. Encouraged me when the world told me I was nothing."

He folded the letter gently, even though it had nowhere to go.

"He believed in me. When I didn’t."

Rex felt tears prick his eyes.

One day, In a yellowed apartment with rotting floorboards, Rex found the letters.

Hundreds.

To Theo. His younger brother. His only constant.

"My dear Theo..." they all began.

Rex read them while Vincent painted sunflowers on the kitchen wall with a candle stump.

He read about how Vincent once worked in a bookstore. How he tried to be a preacher in a coal-mining village and gave away all his clothes to the poor — only to be dismissed for being too extreme. How he fell in love with a widow who rejected him, how he was laughed at, dismissed, institutionalized.

And how, through all of it, he never stopped painting.

(End of Chapter)