The Return of the Forgotten Light #BlogchatterHalfMarathon @Blogchatter

I once gave up the brush—  
the quiet conversation between color and silence,  
because life,  
in its clumsy insistence on practicalities,  
told me art was not an inheritance but a luxury.  
I folded my dreams like winter shawls,  
neatly,  
behind the curtain of responsibilities.  
Years warmed and cooled  
like indifferent seasons,  
and I watched from a distance  
as life painted itself in gray,  
without me.

I remember the last time I touched a canvas—  
I had mixed the color of regret unknowingly,  
a kind of pale orange that should have been joy  
but wasn’t.  
The brush trembled,  
not from lack of skill,  
but from the echo of voices  
that whispered “grow up.”  
And I believed them.  
So I packed away the jar of turpentine,  
the palette,  
the promise—  
thinking survival alone  
could replace creation.

For years, I turned toward practical ambitions,  
things with shapes and outcomes—  
spreadsheets,  
decisions that smelled like deadlines,  
rooms that applauded consistency  
but never imagination.  
People called it maturity.  
I called it forgetting.

And yet—  
forgetting never fully erases.  
It just buries the body of love  
under newer routines.  
Sometimes, while pouring tea  
or walking through noise-stained mornings,  
I would see it—  
a faint color flare in my periphery,  
a small ache in my palms  
as if haunted by a brush’s phantom weight.  
But habit is a strong gatekeeper,  
and nostalgia alone  
is not a key.

Then one day,  
a child’s painting came home with me—  
a neighbor’s daughter,  
eyed with sunlight,  
had given me her masterpiece:  
three blue clouds and a green sun.  
She said, “It’s how the world looks  
before bedtime.”  
And something in me splintered.  
Not painfully—  
but softly,  
like an old door cracking open for air.  
The scent of my forgotten self returned—  
linseed, ochre,  
and that strange courage that lives only  
between fingers and colors.

I didn’t plan the return.  
Returns seldom are planned.  
They happen in moments  
when something invisible inside you says,  
“enough pretending.” 
I found my old art box,  
its latch stiff from disuse.  
Inside, time had slept:  
bristles hardened, tubes rusted with quiet.  
Even decay looked beautiful.  
I cleaned each brush  
as though apologizing  
for years of neglect.  
When I touched the first color again,  
it felt heavier than memory,  
lighter than guilt—  
as if it had been waiting  
patiently  
for my confession.

The first painting was clumsy,  
the lines uncertain,  
the edges unsure of their future.  
But my hands remembered movements  
my mind had forgotten.  
Something sacred rose from that struggle—  
not perfection,  
but presence. 
The canvas no longer demanded brilliance,  
only honesty.  
And for the first time in years,  
I gave that freely.

Each evening, after work,  
I came home to silence  
and opened the door to that small corner—  
my resurrected altar of colors.  
Days grew gentler there.  
Time softened like dusk.  
Music returned too—  
not from speakers,  
but from memory.  
I began to see art everywhere—  
in the way sunlight fractured in dishwater,  
in the tired elegance of my reflection,  
in conversations half-forgotten  
and half-longed for.  
What I thought I gave up  
had been quietly living  
in the architecture of my seeing.

I used to think giving up  
was a permanent act,  
a sealed door.  
But I have learned now  
that some things do not stay gone—  
they circle back  
like determined birds  
to wherever they first felt understood.  
You can silence them  
for a season or ten,  
but not forever.  
Their language waits in your blood.  
Their rhythm hums in your breathing.  
And one day,  
even without calling,  
you will find them again.

There’s something strange in the act of return—  
the way familiarity mixes with rediscovery,  
how you feel both the same  
and completely transformed.  
When I began painting again,  
I did not seek recognition.  
I sought reconciliation.  
The brush and I  
talked like estranged lovers—  
tentatively at first,  
then passionately,  
until color forgave me.

I started painting moments  
I once hurried past—  
a streetlamp humming in fog,  
a broken mug under late sunlight,  
an old letter’s torn edge.  
Each painting became  
a form of apology,  
and also a prayer.  
Because returning to something you loved  
is not merely resuming—it is renewing.  
It’s like watering a plant  
you once believed dead,  
only to watch it unfold  
with even brighter leaves.

And as I filled one canvas after another,  
I realized art did not return to me;  
I returned to myself.  
It was never the brush I missed—  
it was the way it carried silence into color,  
the way it translated ache  
into something visible.  
It was the permission it gave me  
to simply be.

Sometimes I wonder  
what else we give up in our lifetimes  
thinking it’s practical to forget.  
The stories we do not write.  
The letters we never send.  
The music we stop playing  
because someone said  
we’re too old, too late, too busy.  
But they, too, wait for us—  
these forsaken versions of the self.  
They mark time in quiet rooms,  
hoping we’ll remember  
on some blue Tuesday  
or golden dusk  
to pick them back up  
and begin again.

Now, when I paint,  
it’s no longer ambition—  
it’s communion.  
I do not chase beauty;  
I uncover it.  
I do not paint to impress;  
I paint to listen.  
The act itself is enough.  
It tells me,  
“you are still alive  
in the way that matters.”  
And that, I think,  
is what return really means—  
not a reversal of loss,  
but a remembrance of aliveness.

Once, I thought giving up  
made me practical.  
Now, I see it only made me incomplete.  
And returning—  
returning made me whole again.  
The years I spent away were not wasted;  
they were incubation,  
a silent mending,  
a necessary pause.
Even absence can be a teacher.

Today, my paintings hang  
not in galleries,  
but in my own space of truth.  
Friends visit and say,  
“You’ve changed,”  
and I smile because they’re only half right.  
I haven’t changed—  
I’ve come back.  
The returning self is not a new self;  
it’s the truest one—  
the part that refuses extinction.

Sometimes, late at night,  
I gaze at a half-finished canvas  
and think of all the people  
still living without their lost loves—  
their shelved guitars,  
their unopened journals,  
their quiet gardens overgrown.  
I want to tell them:  
it’s not too late.  
What waits for you  
never really left.  
It’s waiting for the sound of your hands,  
for the rhythm of your courage.

And when you return,  
you’ll find not what you lost,  
but what was patiently being shaped  
in your absence—  
a deeper tenderness,  
a slower kind of joy,  
a rhythm that matches your breath  
in this new season of becoming.

So yes,  
I once gave up the brush.  
I surrendered to ordinary life,  
believing artistry could be postponed  
or forgotten.  
But life, as it turns out,  
does not forget your language of wonder.  
It will find you again—  
through a child’s drawing,  
a storm’s hue,  
a stranger’s song.  
And when it does,  
you will not just return to art;  
you will return to awe.

And even now,  
when I paint, I whisper quietly:  
thank you, old dream, for waiting  
longer than I deserved.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon