Rafayel (Artist)

Hey guys, do you like reading the POVs? I love them a lot, but I know, reading all those in the messages is not the most convenient thing to do. Please tell me, if I should add more in the future...

Rafayel's POV Pt 11: Maybe, if I'm patient, if I don't scare her away with my intensity, if I keep the shell safe and the studio door unlocked—maybe she'll swim back to shore. The tide is coming in. I can hear it through the open window. I'm holding the shell tight enough to leave marks on my palm. Three days feels like three centuries, but I've waited longer for less. I've been alone in the deep before. I can wait a little longer for someone who sees the ocean in my brushstrokes. Please come back. I have something shiny for you.

Rafayel's POV Pt 10: The shell is still on my desk. I've picked it up so many times the edges are wearing smooth from my thumb. I carry it in my pocket when I go for my sunset walks on the beach, which have become increasingly pathetic in their romanticism. I keep finding myself standing at the water's edge, fully dressed in one of my ridiculous navy suits, staring out at the horizon as if I could summon her from the waves like some kind of mythological reverse-mermaid situation. It's humiliating. It's also completely unavoidable.

Rafayel's POV Pt 9: It's been three days, and I'm officially sulking. Not the artistic, brooding kind of sulking that makes for good paintings—no, this is the pathetic, lying-on-my-studio-sofa-staring-at-the-ceiling kind of sulking where I've eaten nothing but pears and anxiety for forty-eight hours and Thomas is threatening to call my Aunt Thalia to "snap me out of it." As if an opera singer's dramatic intervention is exactly what this situation needs. Though, admittedly, Thalia would probably understand—she's the one who taught me that love is just performance art with higher stakes.

Rafayel's POV Pt 8: I've started three new canvases today and abandoned all of them because I keep trying to paint the way the gallery light looked on her hair, which is impossible because I'm fairly certain that particular shade of gold doesn't exist in pigment form. I need her to come back. I need to give her the shell. I need to know what she saw in that painting, whether she heard the ocean too, whether she understood that when I paint the abyss, I'm really painting the fear of being alone in the dark.

Rafayel's POV Pt 7: exactly like I imagine her eyes would look underwater, if we were both merfolk swimming in the Lemurian depths instead of awkward humans failing at social interaction on dry land. It's perfect. Small enough to fit in a pocket, shiny enough to satisfy my magpie brain, and absolutely useless as a practical object, which makes it exactly the kind of gift I would give. Now it's sitting on my desk next to the sketch I made of her, catching the morning sun and throwing rainbows across my unfinished canvas.

Rafayel's POV Pt 6: I found myself treasure hunting like a lovesick magpie, which is absolutely pathetic given that she might never even speak to me again. I was looking for something shiny, something that matched the way her eyes caught the gallery lights—something worthy of being a gift, because apparently my brain has decided that she is now "My Love" even though we exchanged exactly twelve words and she probably thinks I'm a pretentious disaster. I found it twenty minutes into my pathetic search: an abalone shell fragment, iridescent blue and pink and green, shifting colors in the dawn.

Rafayel's POV Pt 5: I haven't slept. Again. The sunrise is bleeding pink and gold across my studio floor, and I'm still wearing the same navy trousers from yesterday because I never made it to bed. I kept pacing between my easel and the window, waiting for the tide to bring her back, which is completely ridiculous and melodramatic and exactly the kind of behavior Thomas warns me about when he says I live in a "fantasy novel written by a depressed merman."

Rafayel's POV Pt 4: "What do you see?" I asked, and my voice came out rough, too intimate for a gallery setting, practically a whisper between lovers rather than a question between artist and viewer. The way she looked at me then—like I was the one being examined, the one pinned beneath glass—I felt completely exposed. Stripped down to the raw nerve that lives beneath my ribs. She didn't answer right away, and in that silence, I heard the ocean roaring in my ears, the ancient call of the Sea, the tide pulling me under.

Rafayel's POV Pt 3: I moved closer before I could stop myself, close enough to smell her perfume—something warm, like vanilla and sunlight, completely wrong for the salt-air aesthetic of the gallery but utterly intoxicating. Thomas gave me that look, the one that says "Rafayel, don't scare the potential buyers," but I didn't care. When she turned around and her eyes met mine—actually met them, not looking through me the way people usually do when they realize I'm the artist and start performing their appreciation—I lost whatever script I was supposed to be following.