permanent vacation

I am certain kind of tourist

I used to have a ritual: this song on loop, the tires of my bike humming against the shore path, the world washed in the lilac and orange of a dying sun. I sold the bike. The ritual faded. The song remained, a fossil of a specific kind of loneliness.

Around that time, there was a painter. A friend. She worked on wood veneers—pale, sanded surfaces the size of a ledger page. Her palette was the color of forgotten things: bruised pinks, quiet blues, the gray of a dove’s underwing.

She painted awkward spaces. Concrete gaps between buildings meant to be unseen. Parking lot curbs that led to nowhere. The useless islands of dead grass between lanes of traffic. And in these non-places, she put me. Always from behind. A silhouette turned away, shoulders curved against the weight of bad design. I was a ghost in the machine of a city that didn’t know it was broken.

When she finished, she told me she would sand them down. The veneers were expensive. The offer was clear: save them now, or they become memory. I did nothing. I loved the elegy but refused to pay the cost of its preservation. The paintings are gone. I remain—the ghost, now without even his landscape.

I asked her to paint me that way. I think I wanted proof I could leave a mark, even a faint one, even if only as an absence. She gave me that proof, and I let it vanish.

The people in that story are echoes now. Even the echo is fading.

But now, there is a new light on the horizon.

I watch it. A newly born star, fierce and uncertain. It does not ask for anything. It simply exists, and in existing, demands a decision. Will I only observe this light, too? Document its rise and eventual fade into another beautiful, sad story? Or will I finally step out of the frame and meet it?

The old story is a cherished wound. But you—you are a question I am finally brave enough to want to answer.

Not yet a friend. No series of paintings. Just a silent, gravitational pull. A chance to build a space that isn’t awkward, but intentional. A story where the character finally turns around.

And says yes.