The Painting That Remembered Me

​

I was twenty-five when I painted it.

​

At that age, one believes life announces itself clearly—through love, through certainty, through decisive moments that feel permanent. I painted the roses just before my first marriage, convinced, as we so often are, that I stood at the threshold of something lasting. The marriage endured six months. The painting endured far longer.

 

In those days in France, I painted compulsively. There was no plan, no audience, no hunger for recognition. Painting was simply how I breathed.

When a canvas was finished, I leaned it against a wall in my father’s house and began another. I did not sell them. I did not photograph them. I did not imagine they would matter beyond the moment of their making.

 

Then life intervened, as it always does.

 

Five years later, I left for Hong Kong. My paintings stayed behind, silent witnesses to a version of me already slipping into memory. From Hong Kong, I went straight to the United States in 1998, never returning to France. My father sold the house and moved south. The paintings vanished into the blur of time. I assumed—without sadness—that they had been donated, discarded, absorbed by other lives.

 

I did not mourn them. I was busy surviving.

 

The years that followed were not gentle. There was a divorce. A bankruptcy. A succession of financial collapses that hollowed out certainty and replaced it with grit. I raised my daughter mostly alone, stitching together a life through economic crashes, lost companies, lost homes, and relationships that never quite fit the shape of my soul.

 

Still, I endured. I always did.

 

In 2017, I built a marketing agency from nothing and watched it succeed. I helped grow companies, shape brands, rescue futures. I painted at night. I painted when words failed. Over thirty years, more than 150 paintings emerged—pastels, oils, acrylics, crayons.

​

Painting was not an escape; it was survival. A private dialogue between my hands and something unseen.

 

In 2025, I finally entered art school. Not out of ambition, but out of curiosity. I wanted to learn what instinct alone could not teach me. The effect was immediate—my work grew bolder, larger, more insistent. Canvases multiplied. My walls disappeared behind color and form.

 

And yet, paradoxically, that same year hollowed me out.

 

Loneliness settled in like a permanent season. I questioned my worth, my relevance, my right to exist at all. Why am I here? became a question without an answer. The days felt long and strangely empty. I could not see what was coming next—only what had been lost.

 

Then, without ceremony, an email arrived.

The subject line was precise, almost clinical: “Early Signed Painting – Possible 1989 Work of Yours?”

 

It came from a woman named Jessica Lupo.

 

When I opened the attached images, time collapsed.

There were the roses. There was the heart. The exact pressure of my hand, preserved across decades. I remembered painting it instantly, though I had forgotten it ever existed. And yet here it was, intact, unchanged.

 

And in Reno. The city where I now lived.

 

A painting born in France had crossed oceans, borders, unknown lives, and somehow arrived where I was, at the precise moment I was doubting my own existence.

 

Jessica and her partner Walter and I met soon after. They dealt in antiques, in objects that had survived other people’s stories. One afternoon, Jessica wandered into a church in Reno. The painting hung quietly on a wall. Something in it stopped her. She asked the priest if it was for sale.

He said yes.

 

She took it home, researched the signature, found my work online, and discovered I lived nearby.

 

When I touched the painting again, I noticed something that made my hands tremble: the original frame. The small scratch on the back. The piece of tape I had placed there decades ago, still holding.

Nothing had been altered. Nothing erased.

 

It was as if the painting had been waiting.

​

The photograph shows Jessica and me holding it together, but what it does not show is the feeling, that unmistakable sensation that something unseen had intervened.

 

I sometimes think the painting had its own intention. That it refused to disappear. That it carried its memory of me across time until I was ready to remember myself.

 

Why this painting returned, and why now, I cannot explain.

 

But I know this: it arrived when I needed proof that creation leaves traces, that love persists beyond abandonment, that what we make with honesty never truly vanishes.

​

Perhaps the painting came back to say: You are not done. Perhaps it came to remind me that I have always been alive. Perhaps it came to open a door.

​

What I know is that roses bloomed again, unexpected, impossible, undeniable.

And sometimes, that is enough.

​

Catherine Oaks, aka, Kat Allibe