The Painter & the Solider

Sometimes it takes lifetimes for the memories to fade.

The painting has never been just a painting to me. It’s a pull, a quiet gravity, something that tugs at my chest every time I walk into this room. Maybe it’s because I’ve been coming here for more than a year now, drifting back like someone returning to a place they once belonged. But even that doesn’t explain the familiarity—this tender, impossible ache that beats like a second pulse whenever I look at him.

The strange thing is, the first time I saw it wasn’t even by choice. I was on a blind date, following a man I barely remember now through the museum hallways. I had lived in NYC for years without ever setting foot in a museum… but somehow I ended up in front of this portrait. And somehow, I’ve never stopped coming back.

He feels so familiar.
Painfully familiar.
Like a name on the tip of my tongue, like a story I lived and lost.

People say he was just a soldier—nothing remarkable except for the fact that he saved six of his comrades before he died. The woman who painted him had been his closest friend. She painted him before he left for war, capturing him with such quiet devotion that it almost hurts to breathe when I stand in front of him.

Some say she left inscriptions on the back of the canvas, small confessions she never found the courage to speak aloud. Others whisper about a letter she wrote after she learned of his death—a letter so full of grief it emptied her completely. They say that after that day, she never painted again. She could’ve been extraordinary. But love—if that’s what it was—stole the color from her world.

No one knows the truth.
No one living, anyway.

And yet… something inside me mourns him as though I were the one who lost him. It makes no sense. He lived two centuries ago, in a world made of different bones and different skies. But knowing that doesn’t quiet the familiarity. It doesn’t silence the way my chest tightens when I look at him, as though remembering a heartbreak that doesn’t belong to this life.

I shouldn’t know he was stubborn. Or reckless. Or that there was a warmth beneath all of that fire. I shouldn’t know about the thin scar he carried from his right knee to his right foot—something the painting never shows.
And yet I do.
I know it the way I know my own breath.

Every time I stand here, it feels like losing him again. Like grieving someone I loved with a depth I can’t justify to anyone, not even myself.

There are so many things this world can’t explain.
But this ache—the one that feels older than my own heartbeat—is the one that haunts me most.