Chapter 108

I nodded, suddenly feeling a strange mix of terror and exhilaration. As we approached the crowd, I found myself studying my own work with new eyes, trying to see it as these strangers did.

After years of being told by my father that my love for painting was just me throwing my head up in the clouds, me making another excuse to be useless in the family…seeing this, seeing what I had done out of a basement which I had begged for.

It was…words couldn't describe it.

The painting was large, spanning nearly the entire wall. At first glance, it appeared to be an abstract explosion of color – swirls of deep blues and purples intermingling with bursts of fiery reds and oranges. But as you looked closer, shapes began to emerge from the chaos. Here, the curve of a woman's back. There, the silhouette of a cityscape. And woven throughout, barely perceptible unless you knew to look for them, were words and phrases, worked into the very texture of the paint.

It was a piece born of my jumbled memor