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Chapter 22 - THE PAINTING WITH NO NAME

It started with a single stroke—deep, blue-gray, like rainclouds at dusk.

I didn't know what I was painting. I just knew my hands had to move. My chest felt tight, like something was trying to rise from inside me and the only way to let it out was through color, texture, space.

The canvas was bigger than usual. It leaned against the wall in my room, blank for weeks. I had feared it. It felt too empty, too demanding. But that night, I couldn't avoid it anymore.

One stroke turned into two. Then a dozen. Then an ocean.

I painted for hours without stopping.

There were no lines. No faces. Just feeling.

Shadows of something lost.

Light bleeding through cracks.

Movement—like wind in tall grass, or a soul trying to speak.

By the time I finished, dawn was peeking through the blinds.

And still, I had no name for it.

It didn't need one.

It was everything I hadn't said in words.

Everything I'd buried beneath the letters, the silence, the healing.

It wasn't about grief or even love, not exactly.

It was about *you*.

And *me*.

And the space in between where memory becomes something else—softer, deeper.

I hung it in the school gallery a week later.

Just "Untitled." No plaque, no explanation.

People stopped to stare. Some tilted their heads, trying to make sense of the chaos. Others stood in silence, as if something inside them recognized it.

A girl asked me if it was about heartbreak.

I nodded.

But really—it was about the way you linger in me now.

Not as a wound.

As a presence.

As proof that something beautiful lived here once… and still echoes.

It was the painting with no name because no name felt big enough to hold what it meant.

And maybe… that's what grief is, too.

Nameless.

Shapeless.

But undeniable.

It lives in brushstrokes.

In breath.

In the quiet knowing that some stories don't need titles to be true.

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