Dreamers need realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun, much like Icarus did. And realists need dreamers to even float off the ground. They both require each other to achieve a desired equilibrium. It is said that every great writer has a broken heart, and that every renowned artist has a disturbed soul. Should this be true, the two joining in unison should result in a fatal cataclysm both but it, more often than not, becomes beautiful, exquisite. The writer gives life to images in the artist’s mind through words printed or scribbled on a page. The artist inspires the writer with colors transferred from a dark mind. The two are beautifully broken, yet together alive.

When the dreaming artist meets the realist writer, how do you define the chemical reaction? Lust? Desire? Inspiration? Is it fate or coincidence that the two have met and their personal work embodies each other, morphing into an entirely new piece? The difference between fate and coincidence is a tightrope circus act. The dreamer floats just above the bar’s sticky countertops while the realist sits erect with her feet firmly planted on the worn wood.

The dreamer says that this must be fate. We are both here in this moment of time for a divine reason. His head is in the clouds, yet her irradiance infects his mind tethering him back to earth. There is an angelic glow that surrounds her light, tangled hair, a sparkle in her eyes that is either a light of an angel or her demon inside. He wanted to paint her on every canvas that the world had to offer him. She was filled with an abundance life that he believed to only be found in the most remote parts of the rainforest where humanity had not yet crippled its natural beauty. He wanted to bash his head so hard against the surface of the bar that his skull cracked open. He longed to carve her portrait into the walls with the shards of bone and paint her with his blood just so she could see herself in his thoughts. He wants to rip open his stomach and create a Picasso painting with his knotted intestines that were filled with the butterflies she gave him from her first coy glance. But no combination of colors could capture her beauty under those dim lights.

The realist says that this is nothing more than a sheer coincidence. She has sat next to him at this bar before and no words have been exchanged between the two. But he has already configured his way into her writing, although she is yet to pick up a pen or load her typewriter. She is absorbing his lean, pale body and his black, wispy hair that just barely covers his brilliant green eyes; creating a character. She is already devising metaphors in her mind about the way he taps his fingers on the countertop like rain pats on the blue stained glass of the chapel. But she already knows that no formation of 26 letters would describe him accurately and she would spend a lifetime attempting to write a poem as breathtaking and painstakingly beautiful as he was.

He sips at his scotch and she swirls her vodka. In his mind he visualizes the two liquids falling together, mixing the light and the dark, to create an inseparable unification. She silently questions his drink choice, over analyzing the simple liquid clutched in his palm. Why have such creativity of the mind but taste of machine businessmen who step aimlessly around the city’s stained sidewalks? She begins to create a background story for him.

His father drank scotch everyday as he walked crop circles around the Victorian office. Large cherry wood book cases towered down on those sitting in the black leather couches. The novels and encyclopedias mock each individual sitting in their shadow for their lack of knowledge. Pressure from books you have never read or seen that make you feel as though you are incompetent. And she created a young boy who preferred the colors of Crayola over the power of a Winchester Rifle. As the boy grew in height, his presence in the real world dissipated until he had ultimately withdrawn himself in all social aspects. He would drown himself in the solitude of an art studio that, to his father’s dismay, was created for the boy. Music filled the space where voices of business men should have echoed. As the boy reached the age of sixteen he began to drink his father’s scotch and pretended to listen to the business tactics that were being pelted at him like blocks of ice, leaving every entrance into the office a war against the black and white of business and the radiant colors of art. He nodded when he was supposed to and appeared alert, but he was tasting colors, seeing sound, and hearing nothing his father was preaching. His father never was proud of him for anything other than the fact that he could take the drink like a man. To this day, the artist only drinks scotch in a dire attempt to regain the smallest amount of his father’s approval.

She does not look at him; she simply watches the clear poison spin in the familiar glass as her mind twirls around the explanation of something so seemingly simple. He does not look away from her glass. Her fingertips are holding it so delicately, as though they have touched and mended the hearts of hundreds with their tenderness. And in that very moment he had found the inspiration that he had spent years searching for as a beautiful image created itself just behind his iris.

His mossy green eyes drifted from her hand to her crystal blue eyes that put the most brilliant oceans to shame and he flashed a hesitant half smile before standing up with a slight stagger. She smiled back briefly and looked away, avoiding an unnerving conversation. He walked out of the bar and she nonchalantly watched him glide to the door. His single bedroom apartment awaited him. There was no door separating the kitchen from the open room where an unmade bed laid on the floor, tucked away in a corner resting just below a small window. Canvases remained scattered around the apartment and empty bottles of paint and beer littered the floor. He grabs a blank canvas and a collection of paints and allowed them fall to the tile. He follows, crossing his legs as he collapses and bends over the skeleton of his vision. He began to paint her hand holding the glass; each stroke of his brush was as delicate as her fingers. Her fingertips were transferring human magic into the poison in the colors of reds and purples, filling the clear liquid with a mixture of color that it had otherwise never known.

Days passed before he returned to the bar, his fingertips stained with colors of a woman whom he had never touched. Scotch was swirling in his hand and desperation had engulfed his soul. He listened for the quiet bell of the door, but he did not turn as it rang time after time, for he patently awaited her return. Afternoon faded to evening and that faded to night. The sky lost its electrifying color just as a Polariod picture does with time. Empty glasses sat around his space and his eyes were bloodshot. He stood and stumbled out the door, listening to the bell as he tried not to mix up his right foot from his left.

He stumbled through the busy streets in a daze, trying to remember the image of her that he had so desperately attempted to engrave into his skull. The foggy image was just out of reach to him though, like a word that you cannot place. He wondered if the writer was struggling as well, if there were words of him balancing on the tips of her fingers as she stained the tips of his. His mind was a mess of thoughts that came to him in the form of pictures rather than words; it was filled with colors and sounds that did not belong to this world. He was no longer stepping meticulously, mixing up his right foot with his left. He stopped abruptly, reading the double-vision sign that said 44th AVE in large white print clinging to the faded green behind it. He looked away, staring at the parts of her that existed on his fingers and held his hands out as she evaporated from his skin. She melted to the ground and rose like a god to stand with her hand extended to him.

He smiled and held out his own hand. She gripped it tightly and dragged him along the unknown road. All the sounds of the bustling city had drained out and the people strutting alongside him had disappeared. Her hair fell gracefully on her shoulders like leaves in November, its tips kissing the small of her back as it fluttered down. She turned back to him and smiled a red smile then released his hand. His eyes filled with tears as she once again disappeared from his sight. His fingers remained stained but he no longer felt her presence in them. The city tuned back in, a horn was screaming. A bright white light drowned out the brilliant reds and purples until there was only black.

Red and white lights reflected off the white and green on the sign of 44th AVE as a black plastic bag was tossed effortlessly over his body, as though this was a scene that had been done a thousand times before. His description was put in the newspaper and they misspelled his name and they did not say how he died. His only friend, the bartender, came to identify the body. Nothing was said, not a single word. There wasn’t anything to be said, the artist was quiet and expressed himself through images rather than by stressed syllables escaping the distraught human mind. The bartender was later sent to the artist’s apartment to begin packing his items. As he staggered through the door he noticed that a light was still on, shining directly onto a canvas. Painted upon it were two hands shaded in grays. Their fingers were ever so lightly touching. Color exploded from the fingertips in blues, oranges, pinks, and of course, reds and purples. The appearance of a supernova from the delicate touch of an unknown woman. The bartender picked up this single painting and walked back to the bar. He hung it up just above the artist’s usual seat.

Weeks passed until the woman eventually returned to the bar. She stepped in through the door and looked to where he once sat so long ago. She glanced above his usual seat and saw the painting. She walked up to it and stared for a long time. In the left corner he had written in beautifully extinct calligraphy “Fate or coincidence?” with black Indian ink. Tears fell down her face and left purple tracks across her jaw bone as if his stained fingers were tracing it.

She sat next to his empty seat and understood. She ordered scotch.