A Love Letter to No One in Particular

Or to everything I've ever loved enough to paint about.

Years ago, my heart got broken in a way I'd never felt before. It wasn't a text message or an awkward phone call, it was the kind of breakup that pulls the floor out from under you, leaving you wondering what you did wrong when you probably didn't do anything wrong, it just ended. And I didn't know what to do with that except paint it.

That's where "Cupid in love, stupid in love" came from: crossing out the C and swapping it for an S. It was a made-up story about Cupid, but really it was about all of us. Because when you fall in love, you feel like Cupid: you feel like love can do anything, like you could live on it alone, like you're the one firing the arrows, not the one taking them.

So I imagined what would happen if Cupid, of all people, actually fell in love, felt invincible the way we all do, and then got dumped. Had to go through grief like any mortal who briefly believed they were a god. I mixed mezcal with the rivers of the Greek underworld, same universe as Cupid, so it made sense to stay there. I gave it stages: the Styx, the river you have to cross to accept it's really over; the Lethe, the one that erases what hurts to remember. As if a broken heart had a narrative structure, a map you could follow to get to the other side. At the time I thought I was making art about my pain. Now I know I was making art about love itself, and the pain was just the door it walked in through.

That changes everything.

Love isn't the muse. It's the fuel

For years, I kept painting for her. Not for "someone" in the abstract, not waiting around for the next crush like waiting for rain to water a garden: I was painting for one specific person who wasn't there anymore, with the same intensity as if we were still together.

I hid small symbols in my work that she'll probably never see. Slipped sunflowers in where no one else would notice. It was a movie love story that only I knew was being filmed, starring someone who didn't even know she had the part. Ridiculous, maybe. But it was real to me, and that was enough to give the work a pulse.

And so I kept going, piece after piece, until one day I realized something that took me years to accept: it wasn't her giving my work its life. It was me, deciding to love that hard. She was just the name I gave that intensity for a while. The love I felt no longer belonged to the relationship, it had long since become mine, something I generated, not something she gave me. That's when I understood this letter was never really for her. It was for love itself, nameless, unowned. A love letter to no one in particular.

You can dedicate your art to love without having anyone to dedicate it to

Here's the uncomfortable part nobody tells you: you can be happy, at peace, with nothing broken inside waiting to come out in a painting, and still need that romantic engine to produce. Not because you're sad. Because romance, real or invented, is one of the most honest ways we have of giving intensity to what we make.

You don't have to wait to fall in love again to make work that feels that alive. You can decide to love the idea of love. Dedicate your next piece not to someone, but to what that someone once taught you how to feel.

The move

Think of something you loved so much it scared you to lose it. Don't repeat it. Just ask yourself what it taught you about how to love things, and give yourself permission to keep loving that way, even when there's no one left on the other side.

Sometimes the most useful love you have doesn't belong to anyone anymore. It belongs to you. And that counts too.

Sixth post in the series. This one doesn't have a name. Just sunflowers.