Of loneliness.
Of a mirror I never wanted but now couldn’t look away from.
Maybe it wasn’t that I wanted him.
Maybe it was that I wanted to want anything at all.
Because for days now, I’d been drifting in this house. Eating food I couldn’t taste. Sleeping in sheets that smelt like himbut offered no warmth. Staring at the door that never opened. Breathing in a world that no longer had oxygen.
Maybe I kissed him because he was the only thing real in my world.
And that terrified me.
I looked at the canvas again, still blank and waiting and pure.
My fingers hovered above it. The brush was weightless.
Could a woman paint without colour?
Could I speak in this new language of grief?
Could I still make something after everything was taken from me?
I dipped the brush into crimson. It bled like a wound. The first stroke trembled. It didn’t look like anything. But it was there.
A beginning.
Or ending.
I didn’t know.
A monster had given me back the one thing no one else could, the desire to feel something again.
Even if it meant bleeding across every canvas until I remembered who I was before he put a ring on my fingers and a bruise on my soul.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Art of Unbecoming
I ruined everything.
Not intentionally, or violently, but quietly. Festering rot of inability.
I had sat here for hours – maybe more, I didn’t recall – surrounded by the tools that once bowed to my fingers. And yet, all I created was a goddamn mess. A chaos of colours with no voice. A battlefield of bleeding hues, and none of them brave enough to mean anything.
My knees ached from kneeling on the hardwood. My pulse trembled with the sticky guilt of wasted paint. And my throat… was thick with grief that didn’t sob. It curdled.
I stared at the canvas before me. No, wreckage of one. I tried. God, I tried. Dipped the brush, stroked the white, dragged colourafter colour, and nothing came of it. No faces. No story. No ache poured onto the surface.
Just noises in my head.
Blues crashing into reds that looked more like bile than passion. A slash of ochre that meant nothing to me anymore. Smudges of viridian that taunted me with memories of Adrian’s laughter. It all stared back at me like strangers. And I? I felt like a fraud sitting among them.
I once sold a painting for twenty thousand dollars. I remembered the number because it made me vomit. Not from joy, however, but from the terrifying truth that I was no longer anonymous. I was wanted. Coveted and feared me.
And now? Now I couldn’t even paint a single thing without hating every second of it.
I was weak.
