I knew of an artist envied the perfect painting. He isolated himself in his apartment, only going outside for more paints, and brushes for the painting.

He needed more brushes because he snapped them in half out of anger. He was the best artist in the town of Winfield, but... He disagreed.

He thought his pieces were "inexcusable pieces of shit" and would Storm off and lock himself within his home.

When his family started calling repeatedly, he smashed his phone against the wall. This was only the start of it all.

He was starting to ignore his own needs. Food. Water. Hygiene. His hair was starting to fall out, and eyes bloodshot.

He started to draw.. Grotesque images. He drew hanging bodies, teens with slit necks, and even an image of a woman whose mouth is too wide to open, bugs spilling out.

Then the shivers started. He started shaking every few minutes, his mouth emitting a low groan once every other minute.

By then he was incapable of drawing, so he decided to play a game. A game where he would use a long knife, and see if it would chop his fingers one by one.

He would chop off a finger a day, and would chop that finger into smaller bits, and smeared the blood from his fingers on the wall spelling out P E R F E C T in large letters.

By the third finger on his hand, the area where his first finger was cut off, was now infected. He didn't notice until... The voices came.

"Useless. Nothing." These words would repeat inside his mind as he rocked himself at night, not able to fall asleep by this point. He chopped off the last two of his fingers, and realized...

He hadn't eaten any food in quite a while. Not even realizing his own insanity, he seasoned, prepared, and cooked the five fingers that were on his best hand. His artist's hand.

He threw himself at the walls. And wrote more words on the walls with not his blood, but his own feces. His mind flashed with more images of what he could paint, but no longer. He calmly smeared the feces on the wall, and wrote P E R F E C T over and over again.

From the loss of blood, the artist died. Not crazily like a psychopath, but in his perspective, quiet. And happy.

His last words were, "At..least...I'm... Not..." And his eyes bore open, lifeless, the blood inside him stops running. The words he were going to say were, "useless anymore."

The next day, the landlady unlocked the door to the artist's house to say that his rent was overdue. Then she found him, passed out, pale, and dead on the floor...

smiling.

It was sad to hear his death. Only earlier have I heard the details. I didn't know... He was breaking down.