When Madeline left, she took everything but his art supplies and easels. "Let your art keep you warm, cook for you and fuck you. That's all you love and care about, Topanga," she said, bitterly as she slammed the door upon leaving. The house was stripped down to its bare necessities. He would be lucky to find a spoon. She left him the worn out queen size mattress but took the brass bed frame. Topanga didn't need much, as Madeline was right about one thing-his emphatic love of his art!
As the city's most famous artist, he didn't starve for work, work starved for him. He had more commissioned paintings to finish than the hour had minutes. When he married Madeline, he explained to her how important his art was to him, that it came before anything else, even his beautiful young new bride. After six months of wedded life, the idealistic Madeline realized that he had meant what he said, and became jealous of his devotion to his art. Realizing that she could not change him any more than she could the moon, she decided that divorce was her only option.
Of all the valuables that she took, she left an important one, which was his love for her. It filled the empty rooms and illuminated the walls. Half finished paintings lay scattered around him on the floor, as he sat in front of an easel, holding a blank canvas. As he lifelessly stared at it, all he could see were Madeline's brown doe eyes and lush thick black hair. His art suffered from the pain in his heart. Madeline was all he could think of and no amount of will power could get him interested in his work. He had lost the power to create. Now his days were full of pain, tears and hungering for Madeline. What time he spent away from staring at his empty canvases, envisioning her face, he slept and dreamed of his life in its hopeless turmoil without Madeline. This went on for over a fortnight.
At night he always had dreams of Madeline. The dream, which was on of great morbid sadness was repeated every night. In it he searched for her in a long dark hallway with many rooms, calling for her and hearing nothing but echoes, as tears streamed rivers down his face. All the doors were gray and locked, with the doorknobs burning his hand when he touched then. In the dream one dark night he heard a voice calling his name saying, "Topanga, my Topanga, why have you forsaken me?" He cried her name in joy, "Madeline, my belle, I am here!" He ran down the hated hallway, looking for the gray doors that were always locked but not finding them. He heard the silken voice again, "Topanga," it asked, "why?" He stopped to stare at the walls and ceiling, realizing that the voice was not that of Madeline. "Who are you?" He cried!
A crack of light appeared as a door opened at the far end of the hall. The brilliance of it blinded him, as a force more potent that any he has ever known drove him towards the light. Shielding his eyes from the blinding brightness, he stood at the entrance of the door. The voice hummed in his ear, "Topanga, come to me." His eyes beheld a lush fertile paradise more bountiful than any mortal could ever imagine or dream about. His artistic mind drank in the viridian, cerulean, carmine and gold of the surrounding trees, sky and flowers. For a brief moment, he glimpsed the feminine form of the most perfect woman that his eyes had ever beheld in all his forty-five years. But before he could make a mental imprint of her upon his brain, he was wretched from sleep.
Panting, he sat up in bed with sweat seeping from his pores. The moon hovered outside his window, lonely and wan. The urgency of painting suddenly over-whelmed him. He threw back the covers, pulled on some faded jeans and went into his studio. The bare light bulb did not give off the same radiance that the vision in his dream did. But this would do, as his mind was embellished with the images in his dream. He put a blank canvas on his easel, squeezed out various colors of paints and proceeded to produce canvas upon canvas of marvelous paintings, showing the beauty of the paradise that his dream had unfolded. He spent hours, working until mid-afternoon until his urgency left him. He fell onto the floor exhausted. Surrounding him were ten paintings, which showed more of his dream than he remembered: images of kings blue skies, flourishing greenery and blooming flowers that proclaimed the existence of Eden without the threatening sin that was it demise.
Topanga ate an apple, thinking of the paintings that he had created in so short of a time. Never in all his artistic years had he painted with such passion and urgency, nor had he produced such exquisite work. The curator of the gallery would go crazy over these paintings, as they were his greatest. For the first time in years, Topanga had surprised himself, and for the first time in weeks, he had forgotten Madeline. He tried to recall her voice, but instead heard the sweet hummingbird voice of the garden Goddess. He closed his eyes, willing his mind to recreate the dream. No luck. He found himself exhausted and went to bed, not caring that he was covered in paint. He felt into a deep slumber immediately.
He awoke to find himself within a maze of ripe green shrubs, listening to the wind as it blew and the birds as they sang their chirping songs. Silence of other sounds was of the golden type all warm and cozy. Fleeting images of Madeline's mocha skin remained in his memory. He wondered if he would find her here. He began the difficult task of search of searching the maze. His luck was not good, as he ran into dead ends of foliage at every turn. As exhaustion over took him, he fell to his knees in the middle of the maze. Panting, he ran his fingers through his thick black hair in a frantic manner, his mind at a loss as what to do next.
