MOOD INDIGO
I always get that mood indigo,
Since my baby said goodbye.
And in the evenin' when the lights are low,
I'm so lonely I could cry.
She always had to stage a break up before she could create her best art. Whatever that indeterminate emotion was called just after the end of a love affair and just before the start of a new one, she was addicted to it.
If the emotion had a colour, then it was indigo, where mystery and melancholy merged together in all its dark hues.
She knew it was a brutal, heartless method, but she felt entitled to do whatever she needed to do to achieve her greatest work. And the more successful she'd become with her paintings, the more brazen she became in her discarding of lovers. At least she wasn't a serial killer she thought to herself, otherwise she'd have an avenue of corpses to her name now, for sure.
But everytime she let yet another man go, she did feel somewhat like a mercenary vampire that had sucked blood from their necks before casting the broken hearted victims out into the night. She'd always assumed that men didn't mind so much being broke up with as in her experience she reckoned they generally liked non-committed women. This was an age of momentary wonders that rarely lasted longer than a day. Some blamed the internet; she just thought it was a more realistic way to be. But what she often failed to reckon with was the fierce attachment many of these men would display towards her when the time finally came to say goodbye to them. Maybe it was the non-attachment she revelled in. The more devoid of desire for anything long term she appeared, the crazier they would get, falling ever deeper in love with her. They reminded her of those boho junkies she used to party with in the East Village and the desperate way they would seek their next fix.
It wasn't that she didn't feel any personal sadness when they left; it's just that she used the melancholy feeling of their departures to create a mood that inspired her to create endless masterpieces.
She called it her mood indigo, after the famous Duke Ellington song.
She and others (including the hardest to please critics of the art world) could see the tangible results in her artistic development and she could now think of no better way to achieve such astonishing results. It worried her somewhat that she might have to pay a price for the human cost of her art. But for now, she was sticking with her method in which madness, passion and sadness were combined.
Painting long into the night, she sometimes wondered if her latest love struck victim might seek revenge of some sort. She could just imagine Justin, wandering the streets like a wounded animal, telling random passers-by about the heinous crime perpetrated upon his heart by Helena Rothmiller. He'd reminded her somewhat of Jake Gyllenhaal's character Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler, with those sunken eyes and restless, compulsive personality. If only he knew the gift his suffering had given her in the form of her latest work. Perhaps his immortality in oil would make him feel less bad about losing her, or perhaps that was simply vanity on her behalf.
"You make me feel worthless, like I was just a body for you to keep warm with through a couple of winter months. The way you talk about me right now, you may as well have just got yourself a hot water bottle attached to a dildo."
She laughed at the visual picture he'd described, but then remembered the more hurtful and sinister threat he followed it up with.
"I refuse to be just another cock for you to bounce off. I'm gonna make sure you don't ever forget me in the end."
By the time, dawn came, her latest piece was finished and she felt sated, as if she'd worked through all the doubts and concerns of her guilty conscience in the act of creating yet another masterpiece.
Art redeemed her actions and she would continue to get away with her approach for as long as she could.
A few months later, at the private view of her latest exhibition "On The Spectrum", Helena was yet again the toast of the New York art scene and couldn't move for yet more hyperbolic compliments from bedazzled admirers.
As she surveyed her latest collection of artworks, she could see the faces of those abandonded lovers disgused in her abstract creations. Like a rogues gallery of heartbreak, she was thankful only she would know about them.
And to further vindicate her artistic modus operandi, she broke a personal record for her highest paid art work, the Justin inspired "Mood Indigo".
Six months later however, she'd discovered through a mutual friend that the inspiration for her most successful painting to date had committed suicide by throwing himself off the Tappen Zee Bridge.
Hearing of his premature demise, Helena now felt the day had finally come for her to pay the price for the heartbreak she'd caused to her ex-lover.
Although no-one blamed her for his death, she felt complicit in it.
No amount of processing in her mind could get her to feel that it wasn't her fault that Justin had taken his life. She had got so used to her method of calculated heartbreak that she had forgotten about the very real beating heart behind the person she'd used for her own selfish artistic means.
And one other thing was absolutely certain to her mind now. She knew that from now on, she would have to find a new, less harmful way to create her mood indigo.
'Cause there's nobody who cares about me
I'm just a soul who's
Bluer than blue can be
When I get that mood indigo
I could lay me down and die