They dance, the little ghosts. Each one a sun in its own fleeting universe, a thousand tiny promises pirouetting in the last breath of the day. I used to see them as inspiration, these motes of dust. I’d try to capture their impossible, weightless light in amber and ochre, to fix their ephemeral ballet onto the rough tooth of the canvas. But now… now they are just what they are. The slow, silent settling of everything. The dust of my own making.
My hands rest on my knees, strangers to me now. The skin is a roadmap of wrong turns, a papery, translucent thing mapped with veins the colour of faded lapis. These hands once held so much surety. They could carve a god from a block of clay, could summon a storm with a single slash of charcoal. They knew the precise pressure needed to render the curve of a lover’s smile, the exact flick of the wrist for a wisp of cloud. Now, they tremble when I lift a teacup. The ghost of a brush has become a heavy thing to carry.
Every canvas stacked against the wall is a conversation I abandoned. There’s the big one, shrouded in a linen sheet. My ‘Cathedral of Light,’ I called it. It was meant to be my masterpiece, a symphony of colour that would make the angels weep. But I could never find the right shade of divinity. It remains a silent, empty nave of gesso and ambition.
And her… the portrait in the corner. Her eyes are almost there, almost ready to forgive me. I see her face in the failing light, just as it was then—full of a hope I had no right to. I could never capture it, that fragile, reckless optimism. So I left her half-formed, a phantom in turpentine and regret, another ghost in a room already full of them.
The light is nearly gone. The sharp edges of the easels and the tables have softened into suggestion, into memory. The air is thick with the sweet, chemical scent of my life’s work, the perfume of my failure. They say a life is measured in moments, but I think mine is measured in these dust motes. Each one a dream I didn’t seize, a word I didn’t say, a colour I was too afraid to mix. And now they settle. On the floor, on the frames, on the still, quiet surfaces of my hands. They settle, and all is still.