The Painting In My Bedroom
The first time I saw the painting was ten years ago. I was with my best friend and we were “art gallery hopping” that night. This was an event that would happen every first Friday of the month in Coral Gables, a city within Miami. This was before the virus changed all our lives. It called to me, and I told my friend “I really love it”. I meant to return to purchase it but I never did.
However, as fate will have it, my friends presented me with the painting as a surprise group birthday gift a few weeks later. It was sweet and thoughtful of them, and more so of my best friend, who I suspect organized it. I will treasure it forever. This all happened two years before my second life began almost eight years ago.
Ever since I got the painting, it has been the first thing I look at when I open my eyes and the last thing I see when I go to sleep. The painting is of a woman dreaming of her love…or maybe he is dreaming of her. She is being embraced by him as she sleeps and he seems to be gently kissing her cheek. It was everything I had always wanted for me. It was a feeling I pretty much kept to myself.
The truth is that I was in a lukewarm marriage back then, and deep inside I was wishing for another kind of life. I wanted a little bit of romance, to be touched, to feel loved, to be loved, to love. Above all, I wanted to stop feeling lonely. This painting spoke to me about that. It touched my innermost desires. So simple. I really think that’s when I began to manifest what my heart had always desired.
Up to that moment, I had never really allowed myself to ponder the “what if?”. Simply because I was afraid of opening that Pandora box. Well, that box was more like a pressure cooker…and it pretty much exploded!
As a matter of fact, the painting was also the first thing I took with me when I decided I was better off alone rather than to continue living a charade. Simply because there’s nothing worse than feeling lonely when you are not alone. I, for one, prefer to then really be alone. The funny thing is that now, I don’t ever feel lonely. I’m thinking that perhaps we confuse the “feeling of disconnect” with “loneliness”.
Each morning for the last ten years I have woken up to the painting staring at me. No, actually it’s the other way around; I wake up and stare at the painting. I love it. It mesmerizes me. It still evokes the same feelings it did ten years ago and I guess it always will. It speaks to me of tenderness, of caring, of desire, of love, of a lifetime. It speaks of possibilities.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words…I agree. I wonder if the artist ever imagined the kind of effect her painting would have on another woman. What was she thinking when she painted it? Who or what inspired her? I would love to talk to her about it. I believe she lives in Miami. Maybe I will.
