Cay came back the next morning, almost noon and far due for their next urban expedition. He was thankful that Judas just woke up probably from a long night, he texted him and the door was opened half-a-minute later.
Cay had obviously been thirsty while on his way back. He went to the kitchen to fill up a glass of water after saying a quick “good morning”, indicating that he needed some time to get ready. The taste of sweet rum lingered in the corner of his teeth and there was tiredness from his eyes. However, last night had most likely been a great night for him, Cay savored the thought of it.
It only took him a rough fifteen minutes to be prepared, Cay slipped on his blue long-sleeve button shirt and called out to Judas. Forty minutes later, the two were at the front of the national art museum. They left their backpacks with only light contents in the locker room after the security guard’s instruction and took only their water bottles.
Inside the lobby contained several artworks in which there were in the form of some large paintings and significantly larger ones, there were sculptures by unknown but probably famous artists propped near the corners of the room. Another layer of security had been added before a large door that led to a walkway and into a much wider space.
Without the keen eyes and expertise of an artistic craftsman but still wanting to believe in the endearment of such creations, Judas and Cay took their pace slowly from one painting to another. There were rooms that ceilings were high enough to accommodate a three-story building’s height, which were mainly used to store paintings as tall as Cay’s house. What was more transpiring being not the sheer size of each painting within the rooms but the satisfying details on the canvases. No digital camera, however crisp-clear pictures they could capture, could rival the hands of people who were destined to devote their lives to traditional artwork.
Groups of white-haired men and women with proper dress-code could be seen guided by guides with black suits, the unguided ones consisted of old couples with cameras strung onto their necks, a loner (probably a local passing time), and students in school uniforms who Cay thought would have a bright but challenging future. The museum held several exhibitions of expensive paintings with security personnel on duty in smaller rooms that day, the inside of these rooms had always been crowded by quiet visitors.
Museums as grand as Brussel’s had always been a place where individual human beings would most likely become solemn and observant. People had always been tasked with busy schedules but were not trained on how to fully appreciate artificial nature displayed by the hands of skilled artists. Although most of them could adapt to situations when needed to, a minute of standing in front of a painting would not do justice for the later had spent years in the process of developing. Cay and Judas were not exceptions when it fell on estimating the value of each artwork, but were most rich art-buyers in recent times any better?
Would it not be better to have a professional to bear the responsibility of guiding the amateur minds of ordinary people by explaining the details of the product, rather than being left astray to comprehend the unimaginable effort laid by others who were extensively better in some ways? Perhaps it had been due to the increase in the overall variety of hobbies, knowledge, and priorities that made humans a jack of all trades. A pity that we could only do so much with the expanse of worldly offerings.
*
In his first academic year at university, excluding the culture shock that Cay had received in a form of an uneasy feeling was the pressure of living with four other people at his student hall.
Between his and Jenna’s room lived an awkward girl named Emma (or “E-ma”, Jenna would later have called out of annoyance) who opened a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at nine in the evening before calling her mother for the next two hours. Her pastime included making unexpectedly bland conversations that she put in with hard effort: “How’s your day?”, “That looks nice, can I have a look?”, and “I like the colour yellow, what about you?”. Months would past, and her comments and questions would become tedious and disengaging and the she had never failed to greet everyone entering the shared kitchen with a forced-smile. She studied Creative Arts with Jenna but would later major in Textiles.
A guy studying Creative Music that went by the name Jordan, which to Cay seemed more like a Gordon than the former, was an uninteresting man but somehow deceptively clever at what he did. Occasionally, Cay would hear melodies of of techno-music being formed with Jordan’s keyboard and computer when he entered or left the hall. His diet consisted of frozen-solid fish fillets eventually heated with the help of a dirty oven, frozen-solid cutlets of vegetables with fading colours boiled to a near mushy texture, and sometimes a diet Coca-Cola.
Lara was a blond, pale-face girl who replaced another blond whose name Cay could not. Her reason for moving to a new hall was due to the constant silent bullying received from her former hall-mates, the latter reason and her motives became more and more suspiciously apparent when time past. She studied in Fine Arts, a subject conflicting to Jenna’s strong beliefs in Creative Arts (“I agree that fine arts take skills, but Creative Arts is more creative when it comes to design. Hence the word ‘Creative’”, Jenna said one afternoon when he curiously inquired about the two’s difference.) and has a lover working in Bristol. Her boyfriend’s presence was mostly known when audible arguments erupted from Lara’s room, which one of them had been about the overly cooked pork chops made by her.
Jenna had a shorter hairstyle then. She left Cay with an impression when she decided to ignore him his first greet on the day of her moving in: snobby but cute.
The hall-mates covered almost half of his entire academic year life, Jenna would become his partner and gossips between each other about their neighbours were not rare and encouraged by her. Her jealousy towards Lara (“You like blond, don’t you?” was what she asked when Cay talked to Lara in the kitchen one afternoon) and strangely Emma was included (“E-ma’s annoying, why do you even talk to her?”). The two had neutral feelings about Jordon since the man spent most of his time in his room, or “man-cave” Cay would jokingly say.
He had a blessing of easy exam’s and very limited word-counts in seasonal assignments due to his laxed International class, formed by the university and governed by another department. It was somewhat insulting but relieving to spend most of his time on external curriculum, adding the endearment of his first year was that Jenna had been sweet then despite the growing paranoia. Without much effort, he was excluded from most of his tedious sessions and was put into a literature class by the head of the International Department (“It’s a waste of time for you to be in those classes.”, she told her as she introduced her new idea of the new literature class.”). It had been enjoyable.
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