I have been in love with Martin for a long time now, and would heartily die for him.
“I’m not leaving you. You are loved,” he said, and he didn’t sound like a liar, either.
The thing is, he was right. The thing is, he’s still here. The thing is, he’s real. Not a dream. A reality. Here, in my life, right now. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone quite as thoroughly as him.
Can you please show us a moment when the painter and the man without a dog were happy?
Fine.
So it’s night again and the painter and the man without a dog have just left from a party they were not invited to. They decided to abandon this party a little early because it was too crowded and too hot and the lack of air had made them both quite ill. They go out into the night, the painter’s pockets are full of silverware, stolen, and he jingles as he walks. “It’s midnight,” says the man without a dog. The painter agrees, “It’s midnight.” The man without a dog says, “It’s cold.” “It’s cold,” the painter says. The man says, “What a pity for the moon.” And the painter says, “Yes, it’s awful. We should tell the moon.”
This is how they talk sometimes. They talk like this to each other and they laugh. They have invented their own language together.
"My dear and sweet and stupid friend, I love you," says the man without a dog, "I love you- do you want to know why?" The painter
nods, “Yes. Why?”
The man without a dog whispers, “Just like this- because you are nothing.” and smiles, gently, with his blood-red lips. The painter isn’t sure he can believe it, but warm inner vertigo encompasses him: “If that is how he sees me,” he thinks, “Then maybe he is right.”
The painter wakes with the taste of bile in his mouth. He is cold, and his stomach is a raw wound. There is no one else in his room with him, it is empty: the sheets are cold, he is cold, and it is dark outside. He doesn’t want to go back to sleep, he doesn’t want to dream. He sits in the kitchen and holds his head in his hands. The shadow of this nightmare will not leave him.
What makes the painter and the man without a dog happy?
The man without a dog makes the painter happy. The painter makes the man without a dog happy, but not in the same way, that’s fine too. The painter pretends that he reads books and likes them, but he doesn’t. He likes painting, and the man without a dog, and the thought that those things are enough. The man without a dog likes to sleep, but it doesn’t make him happy. It doesn’t make him sad either. It makes him nothing, which is better than anything else.
The painter wants one thing. He wants to be remembered by someone. “I don’t think I have it in me to love anyone,” he says. “But I would like to be loved. I would like to be loved.” He repeats to himself. Loved by someone, sometime! By a woman, by a man, by a stranger, by someone sitting across from him in a café who doesn’t even know him but thinks to himself at that moment, “what a nice man, this one by the window.” To be loved at all! That would be enough, he wouldn’t ask for anything else ever again.
does the painter know the man without a dog loves him?
Let’s say he doesn’t. He makes the man without a dog smile, this is already a lot. “I love you,” the man without a dog tells him often. He says it like this, “It’s cold outside.” Or “Do you want some more coffee?” Or “I thought of you this morning.” The painter is not used to the idea that someone besides him could like him so much, all of him, and doesn’t always understand what it means.