Walter Sickert was never in love.

Walter Sickert was never in love.

She never liked Walter Sickert.

Two lovers sat side by side knelt on the grass, staring in silence outwards, past each other. How terribly bleak and loveless. Something in those paintings terrified her, knowing that the boy beside her loved them caused her immense suffering in her soul that she had to medicate by staring into his hazel eyes and reminding herself that he was delicate, and that surely she would never see that similar gaze in his eyes as the one he admired so much in the portrait before him. To arrive at that point with someone, it was her deepest fear and the thing to avoid at all costs. So it cost her that boy when eventually she could no longer tell herself that taste was no indicator of her future with him. Even stories of his parents sat in the living room reading the newspaper and doing the gardening alarmed her. If that was what was in store, she had to run before she was captivated by the terribly polite manicured gardens of the midlands, it simply wasn’t in her nature.

She misses the shabby hair, the unbuttoned shirts, the 70s flares, and the kind nature of his soft eyes and skin that she once called supple not quite understanding the meaning of the word. The delicate tenor of his voice, the way he pronounced the word daft which she teased him about until she started to accidentally say it in her sleep. She missed the jovial carefree attitude that the boy possessed which she envied, but instead of putting her at ease it unnerved her how little care he took for anything in his life. Except for cleaning the kitchen before she came over and one-upping her lasagne.

But she knows it was the right thing to do, she wants to live in a Chagall painting, to fly with a lover in the sky, to not understand the meaning of a loveless marriage, and to admire the skilful hand of Sickert but to fail to understand the look in those drifted lovers eyes. For there is nothing so sad as two human beings entwined who no longer have anything to say to each other, and she refuses to wait for such a fate. Vitebsk is on the way.