Chapter 8: Canvas and Skin

Priya’s studio apartment was chaos in the best possible way—canvases propped against every wall, paint tubes scattered across surfaces, brushes soaking in coffee mugs she’d forgotten to wash. The air smelled like turpentine and something else, something electric that had been building for hours.

She stood in front of her easel wearing only an old paint-stained tank top, her bare legs feeling the cool air from the window as she held a brush loaded with colors that seemed to glow in the dim light. The painting before her was unlike anything she’d ever created—luminous figures moving through vast underground spaces, their bodies seeming to flow like water, like light, like everything she’d ever wanted to feel in her own skin.

Her phone buzzed from somewhere under a pile of sketches. Devon again. She’d stopped reading his messages hours ago, but they kept coming—desperate, angry, pleading texts that felt like flies buzzing against glass.

The humming was stronger now, rising through the floorboards of her third-floor apartment with frequencies that made her teeth ache and her body respond in ways that felt both foreign and deeply familiar. She’d stripped down to almost nothing because clothes felt like barriers, like she needed every inch of her skin available to receive whatever information was flowing up from beneath the city.

Priya dipped her brush in cerulean blue mixed with something that looked like moonlight and added another figure to the cavern scene. A woman with flowing hair who moved like she was dancing with gravity instead of fighting it. As she painted, Priya’s body began to sway with the same rhythm, her hips moving in slow circles that felt less like conscious decision and more like the natural response to music only she could hear.

The paint seemed to know where it wanted to go. Her hand moved across the canvas with a confidence that bypassed her conscious mind entirely, creating details she’d never seen but somehow remembered—the way light curved around flowing stone, the particular luminescence of skin that had never forgotten its connection to the earth beneath it.

Her phone buzzed again. And again.

She paused, brush halfway to the canvas, and felt something she’d never quite allowed herself to feel before: the simple right to ignore it. To continue what she was doing without explanation or justification.

For years, she’d been trained to respond—to boyfriends who needed constant reassurance, professors who demanded explanations for her intuitive artistic choices, a family that expected her scattered energy to organize itself according to their comfort levels. She’d learned to fragment her attention, to always have part of herself available for external demands.

But standing here in her own space, feeling the frequencies from below awakening something in her body that felt ancient and essential, she realized she didn’t have to.

The brush in her hand was loaded with gold now, painting highlights on the underground figures that made them look alive, luminous, fully embodied in ways that surface people had forgotten how to be.

Priya’s free hand moved to her collarbone, fingertips tracing the line where her tank top met her skin. Her body felt hyperaware, electric, as if the frequencies rising from below were awakening nerve endings that had been dormant for years. Not sexual exactly, but sensual in the deepest sense—fully present in her own skin, responsive to her own impulses rather than external expectations.

Her phone buzzed frantically now. Seven texts in rapid succession.

Something cold settled in her stomach, cutting through the warm electric feeling that had been building all evening. Without conscious decision, she walked to where her phone lay buried under sketches and picked it up.

Where are you? I’ve been calling for hours. This isn’t like you to ignore me. I saw something today. Something that wasn’t human. We need to talk. Priya, I’m serious. There’s something wrong happening in the city. I’m coming over. I know you’re there. Your light’s on. Open the door.

The last message had been sent three minutes ago.

Priya looked out her window down to the street. Devon’s car was parked across from her building, engine running. She could see him through the windshield, phone pressed to his ear, face tight with the particular combination of concern and control that had taken her months to recognize as manipulation.

For a moment, she felt the old conditioning kick in—the automatic response to cover herself, to make herself presentable, to prepare explanations for why she hadn’t answered his calls. Her hands moved toward the pile of clothes on her chair.

Then she stopped.

The humming from below pulsed through her body, and she felt something she’d never quite trusted before: her own sense of what was right for her in this moment.

Devon represented everything she was moving away from—the external demands, the need to explain and justify her responses, the subtle insistence that her energy should organize itself around his comfort rather than her authentic impulses.

She walked to the window and looked down at him. From three floors up, he looked small, insignificant, like someone trying to control forces he couldn’t begin to understand.

Without opening the window, without calling down to him, she simply closed the curtains.

Then she turned back to her painting, picked up her brush, and continued creating.

The underground figures seemed more luminous now, more present. As if her simple act of choosing her own priorities over external demands had made their freedom more visible. These beings moved with complete autonomy, responsive to their own inner guidance rather than the expectations of others.

Outside, Devon leaned on his car horn. Three sharp blasts that cut through the evening air like accusations.

Priya didn’t even pause in her brushstrokes.

She was discovering something she’d never been taught: that she could exist fully in her own space, in her own body, in her own creative process without permission or explanation. That the scattered energy everyone complained about could focus into something laser-precise when she stopped trying to make it acceptable to others.

The gold paint on her brush seemed to glow as she added final touches to the dancing figure. A being who had never forgotten how to move in response to her own inner rhythm, who had never learned to fragment her energy to meet external demands.

As Priya painted, her body settled into its own natural rhythm—breathing deepening, muscles relaxing into positions that felt right rather than proper, skin alive with its own electricity.

Devon’s car horn sounded again, longer this time, more desperate.

She didn’t look toward the window.

The humming from below was stronger now, more complex, as if her simple act of choosing herself had somehow activated something larger. She picked up a fresh brush, loaded it with colors that seemed to contain their own light, and began sketching the outline of a new figure on the canvas.

This time, she painted a woman standing alone in vast underground space, arms raised not in supplication but in celebration of her own existence, her own right to be exactly as she was.

Outside, Devon’s car finally drove away.

Inside, Priya continued painting, her body humming with the same frequency as the earth beneath her feet.