Do you know why I painted this piece with two eyes?
I almost never do that. But this time, I wasn’t seeing through mine. I was seeing through yours.”
I didn’t say it out loud when I finished the painting, but it felt like a confession. Ever since things between us started falling apart, I started losing myself too. I became someone else. Someone I didn’t even recognize.
Sometimes love is a broken mirror: you see yourself through the other’s eyes and forget to see yourself through your own. It’s as if your entire nervous system changes owners. Because the brain, when it senses a threat, when it smells loss, doesn’t seek truth or dignity. It seeks survival.
And I saw myself doing things that were never mine. That scared me. Because sometimes, you don’t know who you can become until you have no choice but to be.
That’s why I painted this piece, as real as that feeling. Because if my scars taught me anything, it’s that you can’t cover the sun with a finger: you are who you are in the moment you are in, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay there.
I left. And I went back to painting as I am, but with one lesson carved into me: I like life best when I see it through my own eyes, not through yours.