After the camp, I moved back in with Sam and rebuilt my space. Some time later, Romualdas separated from Nika, and we reconnected. There was almost no money, and rent was approaching, so we decided to go to Washington Square Park and sell work directly on the ground, laying canvases beneath us.

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At the center stood a circular fountain, and its spray reached us and the paintings. The park moved like a continuous current. People came without pause—buyers, tourists, students, unstable figures, addicts. It felt as if everything was flowing through that space, and we were inside it, not separate from it. At times the fountain seemed to set the rhythm, intensifying and quieting without any visible reason.

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On the first day, we sold small works for 145 dollars. That was enough for food, cigarettes, and coffee. We returned the next day, and the day after that. The entire summer unfolded in that pattern. We began to treat the fountain as something responsive. We would say, almost jokingly, that it should give us enough to eat. It was not a ritual, not belief, but the pattern held. Money appeared when it was needed. Not always immediately, but consistently enough to notice.

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One day, a man in his sixties approached. He stood for a long time, looking at the paintings, then said he had understood something simple—nothing needs to be changed, everything is already functioning. It had taken him his entire life to arrive at that realization. Then he left, and the flow continued.

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We sat close to the fountain, and drops landed on the canvases. Some of the paintings kept those marks—pale, uneven traces of water that dried into the surface. We never removed them. They became part of the work, part of the process that was happening there.

Romualdas sometimes stayed at my place. Sam did not like that he was not contributing to rent, but we continued anyway. One day, we crossed paths in the subway. Sam was drunk and started saying that Romualdas should not be staying if he was not paying. At some point, he took a painting from his hands and stepped on it, tearing the canvas.

Romualdas did not react with anger. He hugged him.

Later, I repaired the painting, and he sold it in the park for four hundred dollars. The movement continued without interruption, as if nothing had been broken at all.

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The fountain stayed with me. Water rose, fell, and returned to the same body. We sat beside it—two people with no money, paintings on the ground—yet fully inside that same cycle. There was no separation between what we were doing and the environment around us.

Living in the center of the city without money, with paintings laid out on the pavement, changed something in me.

 

It hardened perception and clarified direction at the same time. There was no distance between survival and creation. They became the same movement.

Consciousness and creation did not disappear under pressure. They remained present in everything that was happening—in the drops that fell onto the canvases, in the surface of the paintings, in the way water returned to its source.