Untitled

(Day 15 – Bilbao – 14 July 2025)

I took 30 minutes to sit in front of a Rothko, untitled. People walked in and out of the foreground, some flashed pictures in a rush, a few took a minute or two to pause. Kids rushed past, unfazed. Adults rushed past, unfazed. A wiry old man in a wheelchair stopped for a long five minutes. I sat, travel backpack on lap, legs crossed one way, then the other. The yellows changed hues. The orange burnt red then rust then an unusual red again. A porcupine, a dog, pain, emerged from below, then faded. The unneat separations bled and blurred even less neat. The dichromatic chartreuse battled the upper edge and poked the screaming yellow. I stared and blinked. I cried. My marriage was there, in those unneat lines, in the thousands of brush strokes and where the paint had jumped over the edge of the canvas and where the paint had refused to touch the edge. My marriage was there, then gone, large and empty ahead: the black paint drip and the whole work at the same time. I sat there watching it mutate before me, hold me and reject me, tempt me and reject me. I too was mutating before it, a whole canvas of a person other than the one who had planted herself on the bench seconds before, minutes before… years before. We danced and sang, the canvas and I. We conversed in bold silence and in that secret language built over a lifetime of private moments together. The painting extended her hand to me, then her heart, then pulled me in for a hug so tight I lost my breath. And I cried and cried and cried.