The Unfinished Portrait

                         

I recently read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and one line stopped me in my tracks: “You are more to me than all art can ever be.” It is Sybil Vane’s confession to Dorian, a surrender of her entire world to the weight of love. Sometimes, I think blind people see art more clearly than anyone else; they don’t need the colours or the brushstrokes, only the shape of feeling. Yet when both luck and art fail us, when love collapses under its own beauty, we seldom remind ourselves that we are already the artwork.

To be loved is a kind of luck. It is not something you can demand, nor something you can build with your hands. It arrives the way sunlight falls through a window; without asking, without reason (But leaving the window open or closed is on us). Some are blessed by it, and others wait their whole lives, staring at the glass, hoping for that same warmth. And it is a strange truth that love received often feels rarer than love given, as though the world is always tilted against those who are willing to give too much.

To love, that is an art. It requires patience, attention, and a willingness to paint someone else into your life in colours you would not have chosen for yourself. To love is to master the silence between words, to breathe meaning into the ordinary, to make a person greater than the sum of their parts. It is not something you stumble into; it is something you create, piece by piece.

                I have often felt that I mastered this art. Loving, for me, was never a struggle. I could find beauty in the cracks, in the forgotten corners, in the faces of those who never knew what they meant to me. But the cruel symmetry of life is that though I carried this skill, the other side, the luck of being loved, was never mine. My art was met with silence. And in that imbalance lies a kind of tragedy that feels older than any story Wilde could have written.

Perhaps this is why Sybil’s words echo so deeply. To say “you are more to me than all art can ever be” is not just love; it is surrender, it is blindness, it is the highest note of a song that can never be sustained. When that note breaks, as it always must, we are left with nothing but the echo of what we created, and the silence of what never came back to us.

And so, I write this without optimism or pessimism. It is not a lesson, not a warning, not a plea. It is simply a reflection: that sometimes we are the artists, sometimes we are the art, and sometimes we are both, waiting in the gallery of life for someone to look long enough to understand what we were trying to say. 

(Last reflection before I fully develop my frontal lobe)