You couldn’t fathom why she had insisted that you brought your supplies. “Don’t waste the opportunity,” she had said. Even you both knew the fact that you would never be a professional. Maybe you didn't understand more why you still followed her order anyway. So here you were, on a leather bench bending your back in the middle of a gallery. The page was a real mess now. You frowned. But irritation rapidly turned into revelation that you never drew her before. And that surprised you a great deal.

Gabrielle still turned her back at you like the last time you looked up from your sketchbook. She was looking at a painting. Famous enough for people to dare say they knew it. Personally, you found its bright tones too cheerful, too happy from your taste as life was anything but. You knew by heart that art was like a person, don’t be fooled by its appearance. Especially, when you studied a painter like him.

  

“Do you know why Van Gogh is a great artist?”

A familiar voice echoed amid the chaotic cacophony. Startled, you tried to locate its origin but the search ended up with the realisation that it came from you. A scrap of memory. It might be. Curious, you put your pencil down and listened. 

You ended up in a white room. 

Full of old chairs, white screen at the front. A soaked brush in your tinted hand, and a sound of leather shoes echoed. Faint laugh. Paint fumes. So familiar. Too familiar. The voice continued.

“It’s his ability to draw out the invisible.”

The screen flicked with life and the white turned golden. And that was how you remembered it. Amber fields waving furiously as if you could feel a flow of wind rushing through your skin, carrying the scent of sun and countryside. You felt your cheeks burnt, your lungs suffocated. And between each bombardment of colours, you saw a fraction of a man, misplaced in his own time, seeking an asylum in this distorted world.  Always yearning, always longing. Poured out his wishes into water and made them come true upon the canvas. Wheat fields, sunflowers, the moon, stars — oh stars.

(That day, you had stayed late without notice. Gabrielle had greeted you with a frown. “You pay the dinner,” she had said as you were walking out the building together. You had looked at her with your signature confused face. But under the pitch black sky, you had not seen her smile because your eyes still had been quite dazzled.)

The recall brought something back more than a memory of a long-lost lesson. Strangely, you felt like being that first year student back in college who loved strolling absently through the faculty’s library. Until you bumped into someone like a hardcore colour splash. Of course, for you, Gabrielle always was a blue person. But this time you decided to let the heart leads on. And painted her yellow.