The painter on the shore

Is it really worth borrowing a moment of happiness when sadness always comes to reclaim it with interest?

I have asked myself that question so many times that it no longer feels like a question. It feels like the only truth I have ever known.

People speak about happiness as though it were a destination—as though one day you simply arrive and remain there forever.

I have never known happiness that way.

Mine has always been borrowed.

A visitor that never stayed long enough to learn my name.

No matter how many times I rebuilt myself, no matter how carefully I protected the little pieces of joy I found scattered across the years, sadness always found its way back. It never knocked. It never needed an invitation.

Perhaps because this was always its home.

Sometimes I wonder whether sadness isn't an emotion at all.

Maybe it is my natural state.

Maybe every smile I have ever worn was only an interruption.

A brief rebellion against gravity before I fell back to where I belonged.

 

I imagine myself as a painter standing before an endless ocean.

Not the kind of painter remembered in museums.

A forgotten painter.

One who kneels every morning on wet sand, painting impossible beauty with trembling hands.

Every act of kindness.

Every laugh.

Every person who briefly convinced him the world could still be gentle.

He gathered those moments like precious colours and laid them carefully upon the shore.

He knew they would disappear.

Yet he painted anyway.

Then the sea came.

It always came.

Without anger.

Without mercy.

Without explanation.

One wave.

Another.

Then another.

Patient enough to erase years of devotion in seconds.

The sea never hated the painter.

It simply behaved according to its nature.

Perhaps that is what made it so cruel.

Cruelty without intention is impossible to negotiate with.

Soon there was nothing left.

No colours.

No traces of beauty.

No evidence that the painter had ever existed.

Only smooth sand

As though joy itself had been a hallucination.

Still.

He stood again.

Again.

Again.

Until one day...

The painter realised he was no longer rebuilding the drawings.

He was rebuilding himself.

And he had run out of pieces.

The colours became heavier.

His hands became slower.

Hope began to resemble memory rather than possibility.

The ocean had not merely erased his paintings.

It had convinced him they were never worth creating.

So he stopped fighting it.

He walked toward the water.

Not dramatically.

Not desperately.

Quietly.

Like someone returning home after wandering for too many years.

The waves reached his ankles.

His knees.

His chest.

His throat.

He expected panic.

He expected regret.

Instead...

He felt relief.

For the first time in his life, something embraced him without asking him to deserve it.

He disappeared beneath the surface.

And there, inside the cold darkness where no light survives...

He discovered the most terrifying thing.

He could breathe.

The sadness that had spent his entire life trying to drown him...

Had become the only place where breathing felt natural.

Perhaps we eventually become whatever hurts us the longest.

 

But the ocean demanded payment.

Every breath beneath its surface awakened another memory.

Childhood rose from the depths like bodies that had never truly drowned.

He remembered every room where fear entered before love.

Every night that silence felt louder than screaming.

Every moment he looked toward the people who created him.

Only to realise they had already looked away.

People often believe children forget.

Children forget toys.

Children forget birthdays.

Children do not forget how they were made to feel.

Their bodies remember.

Their bones remember.

Their nervous systems build entire cathedrals around pain.

Even when memory itself begins to fade...

The wounds continue praying.

Perhaps that is why the painter became an artist.

Not because he loved beauty.

But because beauty became the only language pain could not corrupt.

Every painting was an attempt to resurrect something the world had murdered too early.

Every colour whispered,

"Look

Something beautiful still survived me."

 

His family eventually noticed something strange.

The shore was empty.

The beautiful drawings had stopped appearing.

For the first time.

They searched for them.

Not for him.

For the drawings.

By the time they realised the painter had disappeared.

The ocean had already closed above his head.

Perhaps that was always the tragedy.

People mourn what you create long before they mourn the person creating it.

He could still hear their voices through the water.

They sounded distant.

Distorted.

Like echoes arriving years too late.

They called him back.

But memory is merciless.

Once your eyes finally adjust to the darkness, you cannot convince yourself the monsters were shadows.

He remembered everything.

The words.

The neglect.

The loneliness.

The child who silently wondered whether love was something other people were born deserving.

He could never unknow it.

So he remained beneath the sea.

He allowed the water to fill every hollow place inside him.

Because even the ocean.

Cold.

Dark.

Merciless.

Held him more gently than life ever had.

 

The painter was never greedy.

He never wished for greatness.

He never asked to become extraordinary.

He wanted something almost embarrassingly simple.

An ordinary childhood.

A mother whose embrace felt voluntary.

A father whose presence did not depend upon convenience.

A home where love wasn't earned through survival.

Instead...

 

His mother loved him like someone paying an endless debt.

As though affection were another chore waiting beside the dishes.

Perhaps she never wanted him.

Perhaps he was simply the consequence of one forgotten night.

A mistake born from pleasure.

But adults create mistakes.

Children become them.

So the painter spent years apologising for existing.

He learned that hands could wound.

But words...

Words reached places no bruise could ever touch.

He was corrected.

Measured.

Disciplined.

Evaluated.

Rarely loved.

He slowly stopped seeing himself as a son.

He became a responsibility with a heartbeat.

 

His father was more confusing.

Imagine giving a starving child bread every day until hunger itself forgets its own name.

Then one morning...

You simply stop.

No explanation.

No farewell.

No apology.

Only absence.

His father never truly disappeared.

That would have been easier.

Instead...

He became physically present and emotionally unreachable.

A lighthouse whose light had gone out.

Close enough to see.

Impossible to follow.

What does the painter feel toward him now?

Love?

Hatred?

Longing?

Pity?

Perhaps grief is too small a word for loving someone who abandoned you while remaining alive, bug it’s not his choice because life is too hard for him too by giving him a lot of responsibilities , so he sacrificed him instead .

 

Then there was his sister.

His true mother.

Not by blood.

By tenderness.

She was the only person who ever loved him in a way that did not feel conditional.

The only arms that felt like home.

The only place where the frightened child inside him finally unclenched his fists.

The only wedding where he cried was hers.

Everyone believed those tears celebrated her happiness.

No one realised they were mourning his.

He watched the only home he had ever known walk away dressed in white.

Sometimes resentment visits him.

A childish voice still whispers,

"You left me too."

Then another voice answers,

"She deserved to live a life that wasn't spent saving yours."

And guilt quietly buries resentment beneath it.

 

His older brother loved differently.

He was never loud.

Never poetic.

Never overflowing with affection.

He was simply dependable.

Like a mountain.

Like winter.

Like gravity.

Not always comforting.

Always there.

The kind of soul you can spend months without speaking to...

Yet instinctively reach for when the sky begins collapsing.

 

There was another sister.

She was close enough to touch, yet somehow farther away than strangers.

When they were children, she became another wave the painter could never predict. Some days she laughed at him. Other days she belittled him. She found the places where he was already fragile and pressed upon them as though they were nothing more than cracks in old glass. Perhaps she never knew how deeply her words travelled. Children rarely understand the weight of the stones they throw. But the painter remembered every one of them.

Time, however, has a strange way of softening people while leaving memories untouched.

Today, he loves her with a devotion that would make him cross oceans if she ever called his name. He would stand between her and the world without hesitation. He would carry her pain as though it were his own.

And yet...

Love is not always strong enough to erase memory.

Deep beneath everything he feels for her, there remains a small room inside his heart where an abandoned child still sits alone, still hearing her laughter at his expense, still wondering why someone who shared his blood could make him feel so unwanted.

He hates himself for that room.

He locks its door.

He tells himself he has forgiven her.

Most days, he believes it.

But forgiveness is not amnesia.

Sometimes, in the quietest hours of the night, the child inside him places his hand against that locked door and remembers that the people we love the most are often the ones who first teach us how pain sounds.

People ask why the painter still paints.

They assume hope is what keeps him alive.

They are mistaken.

Hope died long ago.

What remains is habit.

A sacred ritual repeated by someone who no longer believes in miracles.

He paints because the child inside him still waits on that shore.

Still believes that if this drawing is beautiful enough

If these colours are chosen carefully enough

If he finally deserves love enough

Perhaps

Just perhaps

The ocean will spare this one.

The tragedy is not that the waves always erase the paintings.

The tragedy is that the painter still kneels every morning...

Knowing they will.

Because somewhere inside every abandoned child lives a cruel, immortal faith—

that tomorrow, someone not just family but someone who cares and loves enough might finally choose to stay.