At first, he didn’t care.

Philosophy students rarely did—about schedules, about people, about the shape of the world outside their own minds. Anaxagoras had found all of it exhausting. A cycle of lectures echoing the same tired metaphysics. Professors throwing around "ontology" like it was seasoning. Minds dulled by repetition.

Him caring? That's long overdue! Don't you know he doesn't like stupid questions?

He spent most days in the library’s shadowy corners, books stacked like barricades, pages annotated with frustrations rather than answers. If not, he was bickering with Aglaea, watching her eye twitch with barely surpressed glee as she gripped onto Tribios for mental support.

But even philosophers get bored.

And boredom is what led him, one rainy afternoon, to walk the long hall of the Arts building. Not because he wanted to. Just because his usual seat in the café was taken by an annoying white haired called Phainon.

The scent of turpentine hit him first. Chemical, nostalgic, disturbing. Then the light: warm and thick, pouring from the cracked door of one of the studio rooms.

He had no reason to stop. And yet, he did.

Inside, a student stood alone.

You.

Bathed in orange light from the sun, a canvas towering beside you. Your face was smeared with cobalt blue, fingertips streaked in violet and ochre. There was no music, no hum of conversation—just the sound of your brush dancing and your bare feet shifting gently on paint-splattered tile.

You didn’t notice him. Or maybe you did, and you didn’t care. Either was alluring.

For the first time in months, he couldn’t think. His mind, usually loud with conflicting arguments and nihilistic whispers, went eerily silent. The world narrowed into a moment. You, in a world of color. Him, in the hallway.

He began to time his days around you.

“Coincidence,” he told himself, the first three times he passed the studio again. The fourth, he slowed his pace. The fifth, he sat just outside, pretending to read. By the seventh, he was carrying a sketchbook, trying to justify his presence like some amateur spy.

It took him eleven encounters to speak.

You were cleaning brushes by the sink. The silence was kind to him that day, coaxing something out of his throat. “You don’t use outlines,” he said. Stupid. Obvious. But you looked up. You laughed.

He felt it crack open something beneath his ribs.

From then on, the coincidences stopped feeling coincidental.

Anaxagoras, who claimed to believe in nothing, found himself believing in the shape of your mouth. He dissected your color palettes in private. He tried to understand your compositions like he would analyze a paradox: slowly, obsessively, with the terrified wonder of someone trying to taste the divine.

And yet…

Some part of him feared you. Or maybe it was awe. Or maybe it was both. You made things real—beautiful and untamed and present. He wanted to touch that. He wanted to destroy it. He wanted to be it.

There were nights he watched you from across the café, unable to approach, chewing over questions no philosopher could answer.

“If I grasp what I love too tightly, will it die?”

“If I leave them untouched, will I die instead?”

“I kinda want to kill them...or hold their hand?”

You made life feel unbearable in its sweetness.

And still, he showed up. Still, he circled closer. Until even the idea of a world without you felt too hollow to tolerate.

One evening, under that same sunlit glow, he stood just beyond the doorway. Your back was turned, you moved like you had never doubted the ground beneath. As if beauty was something you breathed, not something you chased.

He hated that about you. He loved that about you.

His fingers curled around the folded note in his pocket. But this time, he didn’t leave it on your stool or slip it under your palette. This time, he spoke.

“I don’t know what to make of you.” His voice came out softer than he expected. Almost ashamed. “You terrify me.”

The Greeks said love was a madness. If so, then I am thoroughly deranged. Paint me mad, if it means I can be near you.