Urban System in America-Chapter 136 - 135: I Was Them

It wasn’t just the poverty.

It was the loneliness.

It was the madness.

In the quiet hours, Vincent painted not with hope, but with aching need.

He painted beds with tangled sheets, empty chairs, wilted irises. He painted fields that never ended. Stars that screamed.

"Color is how I breathe," he said once, pressing cobalt over canvas like a plea. "If I don’t let it out, it suffocates me."

Rex understood now.

This wasn’t a hobby or art school.

This was survival.

—

One day, Rex woke up, and Vincent wasn’t painting.

He sat in silence.

His eyes were swollen, his hands trembling.

"They put me in a hospital once," he said. "I cut my ear. I don’t remember all of it. They told me I was dangerous."

He looked over, the corners of his mouth twitching with a ghost of a smile.

"Is it dangerous to feel too much?"

Rex didn’t know what to say.

He shook his head. "But it was never madness. It was just... too much color."

—

"People think blue is cold," Van Gogh said once, dragging his brush through puddle water tinted with chimney ash. "But no. No, Rex. Cold is what they made it mean."

He pointed to the sky, which was veined with bruised lavender.

"You see that blue? That’s ache. That’s loneliness. That’s the sound of waiting."

Another day:

"They want you to balance colors. To tame them like garden dogs. No. Color is war. Color is rebellion. You don’t paint a tree brown because it is brown — you paint it orange because you missed the sun."

Rex followed him through markets, forests, wheat fields, back alleys. Each place had a tone. A color. Not physical, but emotional.

Vincent would crouch beside a rain-slick brick wall and whisper, "See this red? It’s not paint. It’s a wound. The building’s bleeding from time."

He’d dip a brush into filthy water, swirl ash with ochre, and dab it across scraps of cloth.

He used anything.

Rex stopped expecting clean paper or proper canvas.

He painted on wood. On trash. On walls.

They painted a rainstorm across the side of a broken cart.

They painted a funeral on a napkin that blew away before it dried.

They painted yellow into the bark of a dying tree — just because it made the death kinder.

But it wasn’t just about painting.

It was about feeling.

It was about being so broken open that even a rusted spoon could bring tears if it caught the light wrong.

Rex asked him, once, what it felt like to be forgotten.

Vincent paused.

He scratched his beard, eyes watching the wind scrape through wheat fields.

Then he whispered, "It felt like painting sunflowers and knowing no one would ever keep them alive."

—

The days blurred, but Vincent’s fire did not.

He painted peasants working themselves raw. He painted the backs of prostitutes who refused to cry. He painted broken chairs, wilting sunflowers, empty boots, the burnt edge of a prayer note left in an empty cathedral.

Nothing grand. Nothing mythic.

Just life — its dull agony and its hidden glow.

He gave Rex a sketch once — rough, with crooked lines and bleeding edges.

"What is it?" Rex asked.

"A potato," Vincent said, grinning. "But I wanted it to feel like loss."

It did.

—

One day, they found themselves at the edge of a sunflower field.

Not the famous ones. Not the ones in museums.

Just a small patch of dying flowers beside a ditch, leaning toward a sun that wouldn’t return.

Vincent crouched, brush in hand, face inches from the petals.

He didn’t paint right away.

He just... wept.

Quietly. No heaving. No sound. Just tears falling into the dirt.

Rex placed a hand on his shoulder.

Vincent didn’t look up.

He only said, "They never stood a chance. Too bright. Too open."

Then he stood.

And he painted them as if they were alive again.

He added fire to the petals. He lit the leaves with ochre. He layered the dying with defiance.

When he finished, the flowers still looked dead — but gloriously, rebelliously loud.

"They were never silent," he said. "The world just stopped listening."

—

But it wasn’t rejection that broke Vincent.

It was hope.

Hope that maybe — if he just worked hard enough, felt deeply enough, used color bravely enough — someone would understand. That his brother Theo wouldn’t have to carry his debts. That the letters he poured his soul into weren’t just screams into the void.

"I write to my brother every week," he said once, holding a sealed envelope. "Sometimes I think my letters are more valuable than my paintings."

He wasn’t joking.

He never joked about Theo.

—

Rex saw it, over time — the madness.

Not with screaming. Not with delusions. Not wild or theatrical. But creeping. Quiet.

With overexposure. To emotion. To solitude. To sound. To color.

He would paint feverishly for twelve hours straight without stopping to eat. His hands would shake. His eyes darted. He sometimes muttered apologies — to no one. He stared too long at empty walls. Once, Rex woke to find Vincent painting his own shoes at 3 a.m., weeping.

He painted peasants bent under the weight of harvest, their hands worn and gnarled. He painted his own face, dozens of times, with different expressions, different shadows, different sorrows. He painted the sky as if it were screaming, and sunflowers that looked like they might set the canvas on fire.

Rex saw it in the way Vincent flinched when birds flew too low. The way he stared too long at the sun, then laughed and said, "I want to paint how it feels, not how it looks."

He saw it in the way Van Gogh spoke to paintings at night, apologizing when they didn’t come out right.

He saw it in the tremble of his hands.

In the ragged gash on the side of his head, which Vincent tried to hide with his hat.

"I cut off my ear once," he said one morning. "Gave it to a woman. I thought maybe she’d understand me if she had a piece of me."

He looked away.

"She didn’t."

—

And yet — he painted.

Like it was all he had.

Because it was.

He painted the sky with spirals of fevered hope. He painted sunflowers like they were trying to stand tall even as they wilted. He painted his own room, bare and small, with a bed that sagged, a chair too stiff, and a view that faced a wall — yet made it shimmer like a window into someone’s soul.

One day, Rex asked him, "Why do you keep painting, even when it hurts?" freēwēbnovel.com

Van Gogh paused.

Then whispered, "Because I don’t know how to stop."

—

They walked through the ruins of Arles and Saint-Rémy, past wheat fields that looked like they were on fire under the sunset, into graveyards of forgotten buildings and homes with hollow windows.

Vincent carried his canvas under one arm, and a box of paint under the other. His fingers were stained in permanent color. He never complained. But sometimes he cried while painting. Silently. As if the brush was draining him.

"I wanted to be a preacher," he said once, sitting outside a boarded-up church. "But they told me I cared too much. That I lived like the poor."

"But I didn’t live like them. I was them."

(End of Chapter)