CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

AVA’s POV

I had never been an artist. I was someone who seek consolation in a creative gift that loss unlocked. I had no training, no natural inclination, or history whatsoever in sketchbooks or art classes.

Before Serena died, the most artistic thing I had ever done was arrange a cheese board.

The painting gift was unlocked six months after Serena’s accident. Six months of loss, grief and living in denial.

On this particular day, I had been sitting at the table in the kitchen of my small apartment overseas at two in the morning, unable to sleep, which had become the usual shape of nights by then, and my hands had needed something to do than scrolling through old photographs or rereading the last messages of my conversation with Serena on the W******p app for the hundredth time.

I had found a set of cheap acrylics I bought in a corner shop three days earlier without knowing why I bought them. They had sat on the counter still in the bag until that night, I opened them. I didn’t plan what to paint or sketched any composition. I just put paint on the canvas board I had bought alongside them and let my hands go wherever they needed to go.

Four hours later I had something that looked like a bridge. Dark water underneath, storm clouds above, rain implied in the way the paint moved rather than explicitly rendered, which I hadn’t intended but turned out to be the truest thing about the whole image. Rain like that didn’t look like rain from the outside. It felt like pressure, like the whole sky bearing down on a single point.

I stood back and looked at what I had made and felt a weird relieved feeling moved through me. Like the relief of putting external force to the feeling that had been co-habiting with me for the last six months.

I painted again the next night, and the night after that. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I was not becoming an artist, I was doing the thing people meant when they talked about having no other language for a loss. The painting was not expression, it was translation.

Taking what lived inside me and finding a surface for it to exist outside of me, where I could look at it without being consumed.

The bridge painting I did that first night was set in the corner of the room and didn’t look at it for three weeks. When I finally turned it around and looked at it properly, I understood two things simultaneously: The first was that the painting itself was not technically good. The proportions were inconsistent, the water in the foreground was unconvincing, the bridge itself was rendered with the uncertain hand of someone who had never held a paint brush.

The second was that none of that mattered because it was true. Whatever it lacked in skill, it made up for entirely in the specific quality of knowledge. The painting knew what that bridge felt like, the water knew what that water meant. And that truth radiated off the canvas in a way that no amount of technical correction would have improved because it wasn’t a painting about a bridge.

It was a painting about Serena.

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I submitted it to the Meridian Art Fair on an impulse three months ago before I came back to the city. It was an open submission process, no reputation was required. Nothing but the work itself being assessed by the panel. I didn’t expect them to accept it but they did.

I had stood in front of the acceptance email for a long time trying to understand how I felt about it. Feeling proud wasn’t quite right, neither was frightened, though frightened was closer. It was more like exposure, the vulnerability of having to put your most private grief on a wall in a public building and invite strangers to look at it.

But I said yes. Because Serena deserved to be looked at. Even if nobody knew that was what they were looking at. Even if she existed in that painting only as dark water and a bridge and rain. She deserved to take up space in the world.

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I went to the fair on the second afternoon to see it being hung myself. I hadn’t expected to stay long, I told myself I would look at the painting, confirm it wasn’t displayed badly, and leave. I didn’t sincerely want to be in the room while strangers looked at it. That felt like standing invisible beside an unbearable loss and watch people respond to it without knowing how to actually respond.

I stayed for two hours. I stood at various distances and angles and watched people stop in front of the portrait and I read their faces with attention.

Most of them registered it as interesting, some of them lingered. Two stopped for a long time and I could see them felt a feeling I don’t actually have a name for, which was exactly what I had hoped for.

Then I drifted to the portrait series on the adjacent wall without much intention and found myself standing in front of a photograph of a young woman laughing.

I don’t know why it hit me the way it did. She looked nothing like Serena or any other person I’ve met. But the unguarded openness of the moment the laughter was captured caught my attention.

I said something out loud. A sentence I hadn’t meant to say to anyone. But surprisingly, the woman standing beside me answered.

I had been vaguely aware of someone near me for a moment before she spoke. The gallery was full enough that proximity was unremarkable. I hadn’t even looked at her direction.

When she answered, “No, it wasn’t”, I turned and looked at her. She was striking without precisely being beautiful in any conventional accounting of the word. She was composed, her dark hair worn in smooth waves over one shoulder. There was a certain expensive simplicity to how she was dressed that communicated a complete indifference.

I noticed all of this briefly in the way you notice any stranger at a gallery, without any attachment.

But something in the way she was holding herself beside me made me look slightly longer than I intended to.

There was another thing I couldn’t locate properly, like a word you knew perfectly well but vanished the moment you reached for it.

She looked at the portrait beside mine and I looked at her face and the almost-certain feeling flickered again and disappeared almost instantly.

She is a stranger after all.

I had been seeing Serena in strangers for four years. In the way someone held a coffee cup, in a certain laugh from across a restaurant, in the tilt of a head at a certain angle. Grief did that. It was always reaching for the lost thing in things that were not lost. I had learned not to trust those moments, so I moved on.

I was almost at the exit when I stopped and turned back, I don’t know why precisely. It was some kind of instinct I had developed in the last four years of investigating with incomplete information, more like the habit of checking back at the thing you almost disposed.

The woman was gone from the photograph wall. I scanned the room and caught her moving through the far doorway unhurriedly. She disappeared through the archway and I stood looking at the empty space she had left.

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That evening, when I got back to my apartment. I sat by the desk in my bedroom with my notebook open and wrote down everything I had observed at the fair. Most importantly, the woman I encountered.

I couldn’t explain why. It was a feeling with no evidence attached to it yet, the kind I had learnt to neither dismiss nor fully trust. Feelings without evidence had sent me down wrong paths before. They had also twice, pointed me toward the exact right paths.

I stared at the few lines I had written for a long time. Then I wrote one more thing I had noticed and had been carrying since the gallery. The woman had the same standing posture as Serena, exactly the same. I closed the notebook and leaned back in the chair.

I glanced toward the locked drawer across the room where all investigation and evidence I had gathered about Serena’s accident lived in its pages, all the evidence of a truth I had gotten close to once and been pushed away from.

My mind resonated back to the woman at the gallery. I had been wrong about certainties before.

And I had learnt that grief was not the only thing that could make you see lost person in strangers.

Sometimes the lost person was simply there.