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  He awoke from his sleep at midnight, and the darkness of the night, black as sewer sewage, came over him, and he felt the night licking him as a cat plays with a mouse it has caught with malice. He had once thought the night's lips and tongue were as soft as a man's, but now he realized it was a cellar of stinging, icy water. The hairs on his small arms stood on end, and an urge to vomit rose in his stomach; the place was so cold that he wanted to scream or do something else crazy to vent the nausea that rose from the back of his throat. Stumbling, he got up, naked- he was a baby freshly squeezed from his mother's womb and a dying old man. Either way, he was incredibly weak and fell because his legs couldn't support the weight of his body. He felt a tingling pain, and then a warm liquid slowly running down his arm, wrapping around him like the red ribbon that wrapped a Christmas present around a gift box- the glasses he had shattered yesterday in a fit of rage took their revenge in this form, the shards of glass embedded in his arm, glistening by the faint moonlight. Realizing almost immediately where he was now, he raised his head and looked abhorrently at the color-stained canvas, as if Sisyphus were looking at the boulder that continued to overwhelm him. Yet just as Sisyphus understood that the boulder or the mountain was not the source of his suffering, he also knew that the canvas had no part in writing the muppet show of his tragic fate; it was merely a symbol.

The problem is often love. The Romans destroyed Carthage when they claimed they loved it; Robespierre loved the Revolution and France, but his love was a human love, with all the problems that come with it, and if you use the wrong strain of bacteria in winemaking, the wine goes moldy, so that later on his own love in turn devoured him-love is violent, and there is always one side of it that wants to destroy thethe other. Love is a hungry impulse. From his youth, he fell in love with the hungry monster of art, which seemed to him now self-destructive. He would realize one thing when he reflected on his fate afterward: love was irreversible, and once you fell in love with it, there was no way to stop loving it. He is now kneeling before the painting with hatred in his heart, but that is just another expression of love- he still worships art on the altar he has erected for himself. The glass slag encrusted in his hand was both tribute and weapon, and he didn't know if his next step was to cowardly return to his bedroom and sleep, or to cut the cloth with a piece of glass, symbolizing that he had cut himself off from the painting. He had made up his mind before going to bed, but alcohol and sleep had, as usual, mischievously washed his fixation away.

He hesitated and finally decided to take one more look at the painting, which might be his last work, before making up his mind. He braced himself and stared at the painting as if in confrontation, but his vision was a blur. He strained to get close enough to see the lines and brushstrokes, but all he could see was a jumble of color blocks that flickered in and out of focus. He shook his head in disappointment, intending to gouge a piece of glass from his body to destroy this failure, but his indecisive nature stopped him. He felt like Napoleon at Waterloo, provided that Napoleon had not won a single battle. He then hung his head, barely able to put himself together from the shattered pieces of his frustration into a human form, and prepared resentfully to return to bed, hoping that his dreams would bring him some solace. Before opening the door, he took one last look back, like the last one one buys before one gives up hope of winning the lottery, which is a completely futile endeavor. But he was shocked to see a face of his own on the portrait of nothing. As he got closer, he realized that it was actually himself carrying his own head, and the person carrying the head was still sneering at the already gray head. Beyond the initial shock, for a moment, a kind of peace of the dead swam through him. He even felt a strange happiness- he had been killed by art, he had died in love, and then it was all out of love. It was beautiful.

In the midst of this bliss, his face gradually flushed, as if he were in the midst of a warm, humid spring, but in the garden of spring, the cooler the watery night burrowed into his collar, the quicker it seemed. He came to his senses and realized that he had been deceived. Suddenly, he felt cold again, and the urge to vomit intensified, so he went to see if his clothes were all wet with the blood he had just spilled. The wound was still not completely healed, but it had thankfully dried up; for some reason, he felt that the blood hadn't completely stopped, that it was leaking down like an open faucet- he felt like Macbeth, the difference being that he hadn't committed the crime that he had killed. He walks back again, as Sisyphus once more pushes the boulder up the hill, and once more it crushes and rolls down the slope. He was no longer as pious as he had been; he just wanted to try to become less weak-he was Dick Dever without Rosemary. Perhaps he would give up this love later, perhaps he would not. He trembled and reached out the bleeding hand to try to touch the painting, tenderly as if he were trying to caress his lover's cheek. He was careful, but he withdrew his hand when he was finally about to touch it. He was terrified for daring to commit such a sin, and the sound of dripping water resounded in his ears again. In a trance, he saw his blood pooling in a small puddle on the ground and took a few steps forward, but never stepped on it.

It started with a whimper, which was followed by a soft sob and a few tears. Writing a symphony starts with a single note, and the notes eventually become a symphony. He then covered his face with his hands and paralyzed himself in front of that painting, somehow mourning.