A Touching Love Story: A Small Lamp of Love
Since she was a child, she had always admired the love between her parents.
Her father was a renowned painter in the city, having held countless exhibitions, and his care for her mother was meticulous and loving.
She often felt that her mother must be the happiest woman in the world, receiving the selfless love of such an excellent man like her father.
She frequently saw her parents painting together. They were taught by the same teacher since childhood. They had a habit when painting: her father would first use light-colored brushes to draw detailed outlines on the canvas, and then her mother would color within those outlines. The resulting painting was like the crystallization of their love, full of vibrant and lively energy.
As she grew up, fell in love, and eventually got married, she realized that her life with her husband was not what she had always hoped for. They had no common hobbies and often spent their leisure time doing their own things.
She felt that life was like a train filled with bland emptiness, going back and forth. The love they once had seemed like a cigarette butt lost in a dark tunnel, briefly shining for a few seconds before disappearing.
Two years into their marriage, her husband encountered troubles at work. Faced with her disheartened husband, she did not offer comfort or encouragement. Instead, she felt that compared to her mother, she had always been an unfortunate woman. Not only did she not find a like-minded partner, but she also had to face her husband’s incompetence.
After a quarrel with her husband, she returned to her parents’ home. By then, her mother had been dead for over a year.
She told her father about her dissatisfaction with life and her husband, tearfully asking, “Why can’t I ever have the sweet love that you and Mom had?”
Her elderly father did not immediately answer her question. Instead, he spread out a canvas and began painting in front of her. She was very surprised by her father’s actions, as he had not painted a single picture since her mother passed away.
Ten minutes later, her father showed her the painting. It was a picture with only one color, all shades of blue, covering the entire canvas. In the center of the canvas was a fish swimming in the deep sea, with a small lamp on its head emitting blue light.
Her father told her that all along, he could only paint with one color.
It turned out that when her father was young, he was diagnosed with severe color blindness. Her mother, who had learned to paint with him since childhood, helped him color his monochromatic sketches so that he would not give up painting. It was those beautifully colored paintings that made her father famous in the city.
“So all along, the truly happy person was not your mother, but me, a man who received your mother’s selfless love,” her father said to her.
Her father gave her the painting and asked her to return to her husband. From then on, whenever she saw the painting hanging in her living room, she would think of the story her father told her about the fish in the deep sea.
In the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, the water is deep and cold, almost uninhabitable. But in such deep sea, there is an anglerfish that lives happily, giving birth to generations. Although the larger the anglerfish, the blinder they become, unable to see the road ahead, as long as love occurs within them, a small lamp will grow on their head, lighting the way, allowing them to swim peacefully in the deep sea.
She finally understood that love is about lighting a small lamp in the darkness for the one you love.
Thank you for reading! ” Sitestorys “
