(spoken)

The only thing she ever liked about winters there were the trees

It was in that small, sad little town where she spent her childhood that she learned to colour loneliness in whites and love in formless greys which some said were the defining quality of her paintings. The days were endlessly barren, with whiteness extеnding out into a horizon speckled only with distant houses and clustеrs of trees. In darkness, things can hide, shapes can suggest form – but in endless white, you know there is nothing else and that you are alone

During the cold, windy nights, she would lie in her room and listen to the sound of the wind howling off the icy lake. She was certain it was her sister, calling to her from beneath the ice where she had drowned years before, calling to come out onto the lake to keep her company and skate perfect figure-eights with her beneath the moonlight

In the cellar where she often played, an angel lived, trapped behind the walls. In the candlelight, she could see his shadow on the wall and hear the slow, deep beating of his wings. By her early adolescence, she had fallen in love with him, and this love marred later relationships. As she would grow closer to boys, she would come to know them and they would lose their mystery. Mystique was the quality she truly fell in love with. Her perfect man was always the shadowy form of the angel in the cellar walls, whom she could feel, but never touch

Once, in her mid-teens, at midnight, she went out onto the lake and threw herself into a hole in the fragile ice. She sank slowly to the bottom. As her heartbeat slowed and her body froze, she saw her sister come to her, and they embraced gently. She began to cry and finally tore herself away, swam to the surface, and pulled herself up onto the frozen ice

The only thing she ever liked about winters there were the trees