The smell of cigar fills the room in a ghastly sheet.

Thin wisp of grey smoke curled and flowed into thick storm clouds on the ceiling. As the day began to retire and corners of the room oozed with the presence of a dark entity, the distressed painter could not see that his painting was destined to be completed on another promising day.

"For fucks sake," he whispered under his breath, pinching the little skin that sat between the crevice of his brows.

Kim Taehyung: age 25, born as a Capricorn and embodied all the characteristics of one. He seeked perfection and craved formality. Not being able to make his ideas palpable was torturous to him, and right now he was suffering.

Due to the stress of achieving perfection, Taehyung had lit, absorbed, and finished five cigars in the last hour.

He was now on his sixth.

The model sat quietly, observing the painter from the corner of the room as he mumbled to himself. This muse for his next painting was a beautiful woman; fair skin and pearl hair, embraced by a bed of resplendent floral décor that contrasted her bleak beauty. Elegance radiated off of her even in the dull room, and the honey-colored sunset caressed her features at just the right angle. She was definitely beautiful, and Taehyung loved beautiful things, but elegance and beauty no longer was seen as something artistic.

During this time, people preferred recklessness, arbitrary expressions, and exaggerated features. That was what the critiques considered revolutionary in the arts. Taehyung couldn't understand the appeal of it. To him it did not capture the beauty that god bestowed on human beings.

Up until a couple of years ago, the public loved art that was attractive and alluring by its precise lines and mundane appearance, and that was what Taehyung was talented at; capturing beauty.He took pride in his work when onlookers made comments like "I swear this is a photograph" or "I thought this was a real person in front of me."

But his success dwindled into little appreciation for his work, and was antiquity for the people in his town. As someone who knew himself, he had little interest in changing his style to appeal the newer trend of "rawness" people liked in art. But the more he read the daily articles in the little convenience store across from his apartment, the more words like "mediocre" and boring" got trapped in his brain.

His ego became bruised, and right now his painting in progress showed his destress. He had captured her ambiance perfectly on the canvas the first time, collecting all her divinity and transferring it successfully into the portrait, but it was too perfect, too structured and detailed, and Taehyung knew the reaction he'd get from it right away.

Mediocre. Boring.

So he would begin again, covering up the detail and time spent on making perfection, and he would start with a single stroke on a white canvas. This behavior happened more than once, and each time his creation grew more beautiful, the less abstract it turned; less raw.

Right now on his seventh cigar, he watched in dread at his recent attempt, praising it for its precision but cursing himself for not being able to produce that art of the century. His head clouded with gloom and negativity at the sight before him, and there was annoyance stuck in his throat. No matter how persistently he made the model arch her back and curve her toes, the painting kept its stiffness through the process.

His chest tightened from frustration, and his previous abundance of cigarette started to lack in number.

"Fuck." His raspy voiced whispered.

This felt like torture to him. Why was it so hard to create what he wanted?

The painter, head spinning from the stress, physically dragged himself to a corner to smother and rot in his own failures.

To others it would look like he lost his mind.

How he wished to be able to paint content that was obscure and groteque to appease the public just once, but he physically couldn't. His hands would not let him make such an ugly stroke on purpose.

The model, unfazed by his behavior, waited a little before simply gathering her belongings and making her way to the door. She bid the tragic artist a farewell before escaping the brooding and suffocating room. Taehyung barely took notice of this as he was sulking In his own head; unable to see any solution to his conundrum.

"Why am I doing this," he mumbled into the now dark room.

The night had drawn the curtains on his daily activities and had engulfed him in an abyss of emotions. Feeling disturbed, he reached for a brush and hastily dipped it into a paint that he knew not the color.

Then, he began to paint himself.

He painted across the lines of his face, around his eyes, down the bridge of his noes, and along the caverns of his lips. His ear, his eyebrow, his jaw, following the curvature of the human anatomy briskly and confidently. This habit allowed him balance, created control and consistency, allowing him to maintain a certain level of sanity, and to a certain degree, it worked.

He lit his final cigar of the day, and breathed in everything it was.

His breathing, heavy and wild from his long lasting tradition, became controlled as he allowed the cigar to take the rigid parts of his body and turn it into cloud.

And just like how the sun had graced the earth with beauty before retiring, Taehyung followed its lead and retired into the covers of night time,

stuck with the presence of an unfinished portrait.