Page 45 of Brushed and Buried
Becca gives me a quick hug, and I squeeze back, murmuring the same polite words, the ones that feel right. Inside, though, I feel empty, just going through the motions of goodbye.
No one really knows how to handle this, and neither do I. I thank them for everything again, tell them to enjoy the wedding, and step away before the moment swells into something any of us can’t manage.
The airport is a blur of fluorescent lights and announcements I don’t really hear. Holly handles the check-in, guides me through security, and finds our gate.
On the plane, I pull out my sketchbook. The page is blank, staring back at me. I set my pencil on it and let my handhover. Nothing moves, but somehow everything does. Shapes, memories, half-formed ideas swirl just beneath the surface, out of reach but alive.
I let the pencil rest there. I don’t force it. The page waits, and I wait with it, listening to the hum of the plane and the quiet presence of Holly scrolling on her phone beside me. The silence feels full somehow.
Our apartment greets us with late afternoon light streaming through the windows. The main room is a comfortable chaos of two lives intersecting. Holly’s corner has her stack of acting scripts and headshots. My studio space occupies the area by the window, an easel and paint-splattered table surrounded by shelves of supplies and unfinished work.
And leaning against the wall, covered with a sheet, is the final canvas I haven’t been able to touch in months.
I set down my bag, and the words come out before I can think them through. “I’m not doing stripping gigs anymore.”
Holly turns to look at me, studies my face for a long moment, then nods. “That’s okay, hon.”
She doesn’t ask why. She already knows. She moves to the kitchen without another word, and I understand that she’sgiving me room to breathe, space to process whatever I need to process. The silence is a gift.
It isn’t about turning my back on what I chose to do for a living. I understand its power and the control it brings. But something in me has shifted, first slowly and then all at once. A door I didn’t know was open has slammed shut, and I cannot walk back through it.
The idea of being touched by strangers, of being looked at like I’m theirs, tightens something in my chest. It isn’t shame; it is certainty. Because once you remember what it feels like to be wanted without being used, seen without being stripped down, it changes everything.
I know who I want to give myself to, who I’d say yes to, if he ever asked. And if I couldn’t have that, couldn’t have him, then maybe I’d rather keep those parts of me untouched.
Just for now. Just until I forget how good it feels to belong.
I sink onto the couch without bothering to change. The jeans feel stiff from travel, but moving requires energy I don’t have. The apartment settles into quietness around me as the light begins to fade.
I’ve been working on this art collection for a huge gallery exhibit for the last five years. Pieces exploring memory anddistance, the way time reshapes what we think we remember, the spaces between who someone was and who they become. Each canvas built on the last, all of it leading to this final work that was supposed to complete the series.
This was meant to be my redemption, my comeback. It is supposed to be the show that would prove the child prodigy everyone had such high hopes for hadn’t just burned out before thirty. It’s for all those years of being called gifted, of having my work displayed in youth exhibitions, of teachers saying I had a rare talent, and that these hadn’t been wasted on someone who couldn’t sustain it into adulthood.
The gallery had believed in that narrative. Matheo had sold them on it. Adrian Callahan, the artist who showed such promise as a child, finally delivering the mature work everyone had been waiting for. A return to form. A fulfillment of potential.
I’d believed it too. I told myself this collection would be the proof that I hadn’t squandered everything I’d been given, that the gift hadn’t dried up, and I just needed time to ripen into something worthy of all those early expectations.
But I couldn’t finish it. For months, I’ve stared at that blank surface, waiting for something to break through. I made sketches, studies, and preliminary compositions. The moment I tried to commit anything permanent to canvas, everything locked up.
Now I know I’ll never complete it.
It’s not because of one person or one week or one shattered hope. It’s because I’ve been running on fumes for longer than I want to admit. I’ve pushed and forced and willed myself to create when probably the well was already dry. At some point over the past five years, I stopped making art because I loved it and started making it because I didn’t know who I was without it.
And now I’m just tired.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, but I don’t reach for it. It buzzes again a few minutes later. It could be Trevor checking in, or Matheo with another deadline reminder. It could be anyone, but I can’t bring myself to care enough to look.
The business card from the gallery sits on the coffee table where I must have dropped it. Cream cardstock with elegant typography, representing months of planning and promises I’m not sure I can keep. I should call them and let them know that the final piece isn’t coming, that the collection will remain incomplete, and that all their preparation has been for nothing. That the comeback story they wanted to tell ends not with triumph but with quiet failure.
The light drains from the windows completely. I don’t get up to turn on the lamps. The darkness feels right somehow, matches the hollowness spreading through my chest.
I’ve spent five years making do with this creative block, trying to force something that wouldn’t come. I spent a decade carrying the weight of one kiss, one moment, one connectionthat burned bright and brief and then vanished. I built my entire sense of self around being an artist, around the belief that if I just worked hard enough, wanted it badly enough, pushed through enough obstacles, I could make it mean something.
But wanting isn’t enough. Work isn’t enough. And I’m too exhausted to keep pretending otherwise.
The pain starts as a tightness in my chest that spreads outward until breathing feels like work. My eyes burn, and suddenly tears are sliding down my face, quiet and steady in the darkness. There’s no sobbing, gasping, or dramatic collapse. There’s just tears streaming down my cheeks while I sit completely still, finally allowing myself to feel the totality of everything I’ve lost.
It’s not just Vince, though he’s part of it. It’s not just the exhibition or this collection. It’s something larger, the belief that I knew who I was, the dream of mattering as an artist, the hope that love, work, and life would somehow align if I just held on long enough.
