I mourn something I cannot name because to name it would be to admit it had a shape once, that it lived somewhere in my body and not just in the negative space around my days. It is easier to say I am tired, or busy, or doing well. I wake and rehearse myself into existence: shower steam erasing last night’s thoughts, the mirror forgiving me enough. I choose clothes that suggest intention. I smooth my hair, check my teeth, practice a smile that looks like continuity. There is an alter ego who stands behind my eyes, straightening his shoulders with confidence, stepping forward without hesitation. He knows how to speak. He knows how to say her name without shrinking it into his mouth. He is brave enough to ask questions that open doors instead of politely circling them.

I dress as if I am meeting the future. I walk as if nothing has been lost. My posture is a kind of performance art, a thesis on resilience. When I imagine her, I imagine ease. The way conversation could unspool into hours, the way silence could feel companionable instead of indicting. The alter ego has already lived this life. He has taken her to coffee and then somewhere unplanned and fun. He has laughed without scanning the room for exits. He has told the truth gently, and the truth has not detonated. She has touched his arm and he did not flinched at the electricity of it.

I put on a smile the way you tape a cracked window before a storm. I tell her, in my mind, that I am fine. That work is good. That I am settled. That I sleep. This is the lie that passes inspection because it is vague enough to be believable. The truth would require too much scaffolding. The truth would ask me to explain why courage feels like a language I once spoke fluently and then forgot after an unnamed incident, a moment that did not announce itself as a turning point. Something happened, or perhaps many small things compound like dust on a lens, and now the world looks distant even when it is close.

I mourn the conversations that never began, the questions that stayed in their packaging. I mourn the version of myself who could cross a room without narrating every possible outcome. I remember the way anticipation used to feel like oxygen instead of risk. This grief does not wear black; it wears my face. It follows me into daylight. It nods politely when I say I’m doing well. It is unnamable because it is not a single loss but a subtraction. A quiet reduction of capacity. I am here, but less so. The alter ego waits patiently, tapping his foot, watching me prepare for a meeting that never occurs.

Eventually, the day folds in on itself, and preparation becomes its own end. This, too, is a kind of art. The artist begins not with color but with an empty canvas, stretched and primed, acknowledging that nothing can happen without a surface willing to hold it. The canvas must be taut but not brittle, receptive without collapsing. It is not yet an image, but it is already a commitment. To build it is to admit that something may arrive.

The artist does not rush. He lays out his materials as if arranging a ritual. Brushes cleaned, jars filled with water, rags folded with care. He understands that pigment is not a single substance but a mixture. Blue alone is too cold. Yellow alone is too loud. He grinds minerals into powder, measures oil, tests viscosity. He adjusts, adds, waits. The right hue emerges slowly, through patience rather than force. He knows that if the balance is wrong, the color will crack or fade, will refuse to adhere.

Before the first mark, there is contemplation. The canvas absorbs light differently depending on the hour. The studio breathes. The artist stands back, then closer, learning the distance at which intention becomes action. This is where mourning lives, too, not as paralysis but as attentiveness. He is aware of every prior painting, every failed attempt, every moment when the image did not survive contact with the world. Still, he mixes again. Still, he believes that the materials, properly combined, will hold.

Paint is forgiving if you listen to it. It teaches you when to stop pushing, when to let gravity and time collaborate. A layer dries. Another waits. The image becomes a conversation between what was planned and what insists on appearing. The artist cannot lie to the canvas; it records hesitation, overworking, fear. But it also records return. You can leave and come back. You can scrape away and begin again. You can build depth by allowing what is underneath to remain visible.

Perhaps this is where my alter ego belongs—not as a finished figure, but as a pigment waiting to be mixed. Perhaps bravery is not missing but uncombined, a component without context. The canvas is here. The materials are here. Mourning, unnamed, becomes part of the ground, the primer that makes adhesion possible. I stand in the studio of myself, brushes laid out, light shifting, knowing that readiness is not the same as arrival. Knowing also that something can still be made, slowly, with care, when I am finally willing to touch color to surface and let it stay.