Urban Scenography

During the days when I was painting this work, a piece of news brought close someone who had long remained distant from my life. We were bound by the years when we were still learning who we were, and separated by a silence I had never understood. Until then, somewhere within me, there had still been time for a meeting. Now, for the first time, I no longer knew whether that time still belonged to us.

I worked on the painting in a room where the light changed slowly, along with the city beyond the window. On the canvas, buildings rose side by side, with lit windows and streets that seemed to lead somewhere, even when they led nowhere. As I drew the lines, I understood that some news does not come to change the past, but simply to cast a different light upon it.

Someone quietly leaves your life, and the city carries on with an almost unimaginable indifference. Shops open, someone misses a bus, flowers are watered at a window. The street where you once received life-changing news may be, for someone else, merely a shortcut home.

For a while, absence alters every distance. You avoid a place only a few steps away and travel far for something you cannot even name. You feel like telling a story, and only then remember that the person you wanted to tell is no longer in your life. For a few seconds, you are left with the whole story and no one to tell it to.

We also keep things from people that we never chose. An expression. A way of looking at someone before we answer. An attentiveness to a detail we used to miss. Sometimes we catch ourselves making one of their gestures and understand how little a person's presence depends on their proximity.

This does not make every departure easier, nor does it justify them in retrospect. You can accept that someone changed you and still not want them back. You can keep one good day without forgiving everything that followed. You can love what existed between you and, at the same time, not understand why it ended as it did.

Sometimes the hardest thing is not simply that someone leaves, but that they leave before there can be another meeting. The questions you never asked remain, along with the explanations you never received and all the words that might have changed something or, perhaps, nothing. Twenty-five years settle between two lives like a silence no one knows how to cross anymore.

In time, you find yourself on that street again. You notice that a shop window has changed. You remember something and carry on walking. That same day, something new happens that the person who left will never know about.

For the first time, you do not feel the need to tell them. You live it fully.

And somewhere within you, you leave a place for what once was, for the friendship that shaped you, for the rupture you never understood and for the farewell that never happened.

For Lizette, 2026

Anne Parlog