COMPLEMENTARY

I stared at my damp brush before dipping its bristles into a pool of bright yellow paint. Gently, my hand moved across the canvas in careful strokes. The pigment bloomed over the page like spilled sunlight, vibrant and impossible to ignore. Then my hand froze. My gaze drifted to the flecks of yellow splattered across my fingers. For a moment, I simply stared at them, reluctant to continue.

Ah, what a bright color. I truly despised it.

A heavy sigh escaped my lips. It was the only sound in the room, and hearing it made me realize just how alone I was. The silence pressed against me. My chest tightened, as if unseen hands had wrapped around my ribs and slowly squeezed. The yellow paint glowed mockingly beneath the dim light, cheerful and warm in a way I could never understand.

Then… There it was.

Purple. Resting quietly on my palette, directly across from the yellow. Dark, not the kind of darkness people feared, but the kind they carried. The kind that settled beneath the skin and made a home between the bones. The kind that lingered in empty rooms and unfinished conversations.The kind that felt painfully familiar. My fingers hovered over it. A faint curve tugged at my lips, though it was closer to exhaustion than a smile. It was frustrating, really. Unlike yellow, purple asked nothing of me. It did not demand that I smile, nor did it insist that every wound would heal. It simply existed, silent and unassuming, like an old companion who knew every ugly corner of my mind and stayed anyway.

What was it? Ah, complementary colors. The phrase surfaced from some forgotten class room memory, my grade school teacher’s voice echoing faintly in my head. Colors opposite each other on the wheel. Opposites that revealed one another. They said when placed side by side, complementary colors become brighter.More vivid, and more alive. However, when mixed together, they lose themselves. Yellow and purple. Light and shadow. Hope and despair.

Hmm…

Then, perhaps the farther apart they remain, the more clearly they define one another. Yet the moment they begin to merge, their brilliance fades into something dull and gray.

Am i the same? Do people living complementarily with themselves? Then, was I foolish that I kept my darkness untouched? Why, but I nurtured it carefully, like a gardener tending to a stubborn flower. I memorized every contour of its petals, every thorn hidden beneath its bloom. I was afraid that if I allowed even the slightest trace of light to seep in, neither would remain what they once were.

Right?

They would blur together. No longer sorrow, nor joy. Just something in between. It would turned into something unfamiliar, and it’s frightening.

My gaze lingered on the yellow stain across my fingers.

Ah. You’re truly contemptuous. Disgust rose in my throat. I clenched my fist. The wet paint smeared deeper into my skin, spreading through the lines of my palm. Yellow stained every crease, every scar, every part of me I could not hide. I blinked, then my vision blurred. Tears? How funny. A color I despised had truly reduced me to this?

Or not.

Because I knew. I always knew.

I could despise yellow all I wanted. I could call it naıve, fragile, and foolish. Yet it would still emerged from my hands. Still found its way into my paintings. Still lingered stubbornly within me. No matter how fiercely I clung to the purple, the yellow remained. Quiet. Persistent. Alive.

A bitter laugh escaped my lips. Perhaps hatred is simply recognition wearing a mask. The thought settled over me like dust.

A knock sounded at the door. I flinched. The sound felt foreign in the stillness of the room. Before I could answer, the door creaked open. ”You’re still here?” I turned my head. It was one of the studio assistants, peeking through the narrow gap, Max.

The fluorescent light from the hallway spilled into the room, stretching across the floor like a pale ribbon. I blinked. Had it really gotten that late?

”The building closes in fifteen minutes,” he said.

”Oh.” The response left my mouth before I could think of anything else.

His gaze drifted to the canvas behind me. To the yellow. To the purple. Then back to me. And for a brief moment, I noticed the order.

”Looks nice.”

I almost laughed.

Nice. Such a simple word. How funny. Was it, really? He doesn’t even realized he looked at yellow first. Hmm. Why does it matter, anyway? It was just a glance, a passing look. Yet something inside my chest tightened in quiet protest. As though I had been waiting for him to see purple first. It’s almost a ridiculous thought.

”Thanks,” I muttered.

The door remained slightly open behind him. He didn’t leave immediately. Just stood there for a second longer than necessary, as if deciding whether there was anything else worth saying.

”Was it abstract?” he asked, hesitating. ”It’s definitely a unique piece, but… strangely familiar.” I frowned.

Familiar? My grip tightened around the brush. He shouldn’t have said that. Not that word. Not here. “Are you perhaps related to Mr. Leandro?” The name landed wrong in the room. Like a drop of ink in still water. I stared at him, confusion flickering beneath the fatigue pressing against my skull.

“I don’t know anyone like that.” My voice came out flat. Uninterested. Final. But he was still speaking.

“He’s the previous owner of this studio,” he continued, ”he used to — ”

“I need to finish this today.”

The words cut through him sharper than I intended. Silence snapped back into place. For a moment, neither of us moved. Then Max nodded slowly, as if he had finally heard the boundary I drew.

”Right. Sorry.” He stepped back. The door clicked shut, and yet the room did not return to silence the way it used to. Something remained. The name, Leandro. It didn’t belong to me. And still, it echoed as if it had always been waiting beneath my thoughts. It arrived without warning. It is not even a memory, nor a facts. More like something the room itself had whispered. My grip tightened. Why did I know that name? I did not. I was certain I did not. And yet, the studio felt as though it had already heard it before I ever entered it. As if I was not the first person to sit in this silence.

I stepped back. The canvas remained unchanged. But my certainty did not. Yellow…Purple… Something else I could not name beginning to form, not on the canvas, but in the way I was seeing it. As if the act of looking itself had started to fail its purpose. I swallowed. I think that’s enough for today. I’m no longer feeling well. I tidied my materials, washed my hands, and hung the apron. I left the painting as it is, quite finished, I think? I walk out the room, and at the exit, I saw Max preparing to leave. I remembered my attitude towards him earlier. I felt guilty. Then,our eyes met.

“Have you finished it?” His persistence irritated me.

“I already did,” I said. “I’ll go home and come back tomorrow.”

The words felt wrong the moment they left my mouth. As if tomorrow was something I still had authority over. Max nodded. Nothing in his expression changed. I turned away first, then walk towards the exit.

“I remembered why it felt familiar.” Max words stops me. “I’m sorry if this sounds rude,” he continued, “but I just miss my uncle. When I saw your painting… it reminded me of him.” I turned back, confused. He continued, almost carefully, “oh, he’s not a painter, if you’re guessing,” Max continued. “He never even held a scalpel or a brush once in his life.

He paused.

“He was just… yellow and purple.”

I blinked.

The sentence didn’t land as meaning. It landed like misalignment. As if language had briefly failed to separate shape from thought. More so, how can someone who never held a brush nor scalpel owns an art studio?

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, though my voice sounded distant.

“It did to him,” Max replied. Then, softer he continued, “he used to say you could tell what a person was made of by what color they refused to mix.”

My hand loosened. The words repeated themselves inside my head, but they didn’t be have like words anymore. They behaved like something I had already seen. Not remembered. Seen. It was the feeling of standing in front of a painting you swear you’ve never seen, yet your body reacts before your mind agrees.

“He died,” Max said again. ”Suicide,” he tried to laughed off the pain, then exhaled, almost uncertain.

Silence followed. But it was not the same silence as before. This one felt… arranged. Like the hallway had been waiting for that sentence specifically.

“I’m sorry… can I go back to the room? Just for an hour.” My head is spinning and my breath tightened. What is this? I tried to think of Leandro, but the name did not form clearly anymore. Instead, something else surfaced. A sensation of having already known this before it was said. As if the conversation was not revealing something new, but confirming something that had always been true in a way I was never fully allowed to notice.

I blinked.

“Please Max, just this once.” He looked at me but his outline felt unstable, like it be longed equally to memory and to presence.

He let out a deep sigh before giving me his approval. I ran to the door of the room, opened it. And there it was. I swallowed. There’s yellow, purple, and something in between. Not a mixture, not a separation. Just something that refused both. I stared at it, And for the first time, I couldn’t tell whether the painting had been finished, or whether it had only just begun to make sense.

I noticed Max followed me back into the room.

“Say…” I began slowly, my voice unstable even to myself. “You said Leandro never even held a scalpel or a brush.” Max didn’t answer immediately.

I turned back toward the canvas. Yellow. Purple. And something in between that refused to behave like a mixture. “But how could he know about colors?” I asked.

Silence.

Then Max exhaled, like the question itself was tiring.

“Does someone need to be an artist to recognize colors?” he said quietly. “Or to know what refuses to mix with what?” I frowned.

That wasn’t an answer. It was avoidance disguised as one. Max looked at the painting for a long time. Long enough that I stopped being sure he was still looking at it.

“I told you,” he said at last, voice lower now, “he was nothing like that.”

A pause. Then something in him shifted, not clarity, but fracture. “He was just — ” His breath caught. Not in hesitation. But in interruption from something deeper.

“A person.”

A person… a human? The word arrived unevenly, as if passing through something it didn’t fully survive. And for a moment, I felt it again…that same misalignment. Like language trying to remember a shape it no longer had permission to hold. I looked at him. But his outline no longer felt stable again. Not uncertain. Just… layered. As if more than one version of him was standing in the same place, disagreeing quietly without sound.

Behind us, the canvas remained unchanged. But the longer I stared, the less certain I became that it had ever been stable enough to change at all.

Then I remembered the order of his gaze. Yellow first, then purple. We tend to look first for things we crave…or what we resist.Paradoxical, isn’t it?

Then, perhaps Max…

I cut off the thought and looked back at the painting. There it was again. Purple and yellow, and the space between them. Not gray, not color, but something closer to the moment before recognition becomes language. I swallowed.

Ah. I truly despised it.

My fingers twitched.

For a moment, I thought I still knew what I meant. Yellow clung to my skin the same way it did before. Warm, insistent, refusing to disappear no matter how many times I tried to wash it away. Purple waited in the distance of my sight, unchanged, patient, as if it had never needed to be understood at all. Between them, the canvas did not look like a mixture. It looked like something that had always been there, only now finally being noticed.

I picked up my cleaned brush, my hand moved before I could stop it. Or maybe it had already been moving long before I decided it was mine. A line of yellow dragged across the edge of purple. Not merging. Not separating. Just… continuing.

Behind me, I heard Max shift slightly. He didn’t speak at first. Then quietly, almost unsure, he said,

“. . . You still see it like that?”

I paused.

The brush hovered. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the painting…or me? And for the first time, I could not tell whether the color I hated was the one on my fingers, or the one doing the looking.

I looked at him over my shoulder. His outline felt normal again, but somehow heavier now, like something had settled in him after all the words we never fully said.

“Yeah,” I answered.

A beat.

Then, almost absentmindedly, as if repeating something he had already said before,

“It’s nice.”

Silence followed.

But this time, I didn’t correct him. I just looked at the canvas and nodded once. Faintly.

Maybe because I noticed his gaze lingered longer now to the space between purple and yellow. I feel like he wasn’t describing the painting anymore. It’s as if he was describing how it looked when I stopped deciding what it meant.

Maybe it was just an intuition.

Or maybe it was something else I wasn’t ready to name.

A recognition of the fact that something in me had stopped insisting on meaning. Maybe that was what I had been looking at all along.

You could tell what a person was made of by what color they refused to mix. Leandro’s words, through Max.

I let them linger. And for the first time, I understood, not the meaning, but the warning hidden inside it.

And maybe that was what Leandro had once failed to recognize… perhaps.