Loving AIDAn by Hunter Troy

Author:Hunter, Troy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Jeffrey

AIDAn wasn’t there when I woke up. I guess I’d expected him to go to sleep with me. I hadn’t thought that maybe he didn’t need as much sleep as I did, or perhaps he was still so excited with life that it was hard for him to wind down.

My initial response was terror at what he might have gotten into. AIDAn was clearly no monster, but his naiveté was potentially dangerous. He could get himself in trouble, or in an effort to help, end up hurting someone else. He could have wandered into the city and gotten lost. I assume he’d be able to find a way back—he wasn’t a lost puppy—though what he could and couldn’t do were still very unpredictable.

My fears were quelled when I found him in Gale’s studio office. He was hard at work on something, painting so intently he didn’t notice me in the hallway.

“AIDAn?” I asked.

He looked out at me away from his work. “Hi, Jeffrey.”

“What are you working on?”

I walked toward him, curious to see what was on the other side of the canvas.

“It’s not finished,” he began. Did I detect a bit of fear in his voice?

“Can I see?”

“I guess so…” He gritted his teeth as I turned to look at the painting. I heard him take a breath and hold it, awaiting my response.

It sounds vain when I put it into words, but it was the greatest painting I’d ever seen in my life. Though I never learned much about art outside an introductory class during my freshman year of college, I could see fine details in the image and an energy to the strokes. It had the excitement of a Pollock, as if the painting had been thrown at the canvas, but also contained the impressionistic qualities of a Van Gogh, full of emotion while still representing reality. And yet there was something classical about it, a three-dimensional quality that almost made it seem like a photograph.

And it was of me.

Specifically, it was of me through AIDAn’s eyes. It recreated every one of my features perfectly, those were my cheeks and it was my smile on the figure’s face. It also had the imperfections, the small patch of acne scars on my cheek and the hint of a unibrow that I could never manage to completely hide.

Whenever I looked in a mirror, I hated those features and wished I was somebody else. In the portrait, I found them beautiful. Without changing anything about my physical appearance, AIDAn had managed to make me love the way I looked. I got a boost of confidence looking at myself and felt myself stand taller as a result.

“Like I said,” AIDAn said. “It’s not quite finished.”

“It’s unbelievable,” I said, though that didn’t scratch the surface of how I felt about it. No, it wasn’t just unbelievable, it defied description. It redefined what art could be and possibly even what art was. It made me rethink myself and how other people saw me or thought of me.

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