One thing I have learned while looking at your sly fingers was the way it sketched every line - slowly forming an almost perfect posture of a young woman, looking away from our direction as if searching for something beyond our world, beyond our empty canvas that are sometimes splattered with paint, undecipherable shapes, or blank spaces. It is in every canvas, in every form that runs away from your cell of ideas that made me want to be something more than just being a good painter, someting more than casting hues upon my young face.
I have always admired your fingers. I know that you felt it everytime I try to re-count them as if one went missing. Again and again, 'til I can no longer count from one to ten but now of dreams that I wish we can fulfill, and of paintings that I wish I could transform into a magical living thing that only we are capable to be with. I know you felt it too, when I tried to place my palm unto yours because I'd sometimes think that maybe it is with the size of my hands or in lines drawn upon my palms that made me different from the style you display in your works. Maybe it was there, somewhere between your fingers that made you so admirable. But we both know it were not.
I have always admired your fingers, the tranquil constellations in its tips. I have always admired them, not until they slowly clasped onto foil, turning its soft details into mad, mad fists. I have always wanted to hold it for so long not until it slowly grasped for deadly triggers and pointing it on to our mirrors and then bang! So as our life crashed into pieces, so as your pieces are no longer alive. I have always wanted to secure mine between them, not until your moves no longer bring safety, not until your eyes can no longer recognize the pictures you've drawn in my dreams, not until you can no longer hold your paintbrushes or pencils that are placed in complete disarray on top of the table. I have always admired your fingers, not until it was placed on me, on her, and all that I could remember were blood, and strangled neck, and broken mirrors, or bruises on her once fair skin.
I have always admired your fingers, and you, being so great in everything you do but not when you turned my yellow gardens into whacking gates passing through forests.
I have always admired your art; the woman in black, the mango tree, the children in the park, the dancing women, the christmas hat. I have always looked upon them as if they were giving me life, but now they're all ashes when you burned them whilst being high and I can hear its screams as if begging for salvation, as if it was me begging for you to paint it again.
I have always admired your fingers, and never did I stop counting them.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.
Ten years have passed by so quickly but I'm still admiring them as if I was still six, as if I was still dreaming to be a painter like how you've been.
Ten years came by like a flashing memory and I tried to bury all the moments when your fingers seemed like the ones strangling my dreams.
I have always admired your fingers, long before they were so good at painting and until now that they can no longer hold the masterpieces it once yield.
I have always admired your fingers; the loving, the mad, and the tired.
It is still your fingers that I want to hold even if it were all covered by blood and unwashed memories from the back of our present life.
I'll let you fix the colors that splattered into havoc, the lines that are drawn so messily in our weak mural that it painfully broke its edges,
I'll let you prepare the canvas,
but let me paint our dreams this time -
dad, i love you.