Dry Paint

2023-12-04

In the austere expanse of a room whose purpose had long been forgotten, there stood a wall, solitary and unassuming in its architectural duty. It was a canvas of such unblemished purity that one could scarce believe it had known the caress of a brush. And yet, it was in the midst of transformation—a tableau in the slow, silent symphony of paint drying.

The paint itself, a white that seemed to hold within it the very essence of voids yet to be filled with color, clung to the wall like a new skin. It was the kind of white that was not merely the absence of color but the promise of all colors, the potential of rainbows yet to be born from light’s capricious dance.

As time meandered indifferently, the sheen upon the wall’s face began its retreat. The wet gloss, once reflective as a still pond at dawn, now dulled in an act of quiet maturation. The process was imperceptible to the impatient, but to the connoisseur of the mundane, it was a spectacle of the highest order.

With each passing moment, the paint’s transformation was marked by the subtlest of changes—the gentlest tightening of its coat, the faintest shift in texture. The wall, a sentinel of the silent room, bore its new armor with the stoicism of a statue, undisturbed by the commotion of existence beyond its confines.

Specks of dust, almost invisible to the naked eye, dared to mar the uniformity of the paint, yet in doing so, they bestowed upon the wall a constellation of imperfections, a testament to the beauty of flaws in a universe obsessed with the pursuit of perfection.

The drying paint whispered tales of change to those who would listen—a chronicle of the air's embrace, the moisture's retreat, and the alchemy of curing compounds. It spoke of the weight of time, the unseen forces that shape our very being, the quiet alchemy that governs the act of becoming.

As the final sheen relinquished its hold, yielding to the inevitability of a matte finish, the wall stood transformed. No longer merely a barrier or boundary, it had become a silent witness, a keeper of secrets in a room that echoed with the ghosts of conversations never had, of colors never seen.

And there it was, the white wall, an ode to the beauty of the banal, a monument to the mundane, standing as a testament to the time that flows not with the rush of a river but with the hush of paint drying, a paradox of the stillness within change.

From the author

To read the next story, gather the mist from a morning breeze, fold it into an envelope, and post it to the address where yesterday meets tomorrow.

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