This painting was born in the first raw hours of grief — the day after my mother died, when the world no longer felt solid and time had not yet learned how to move again. The image of this bird came to me fully formed. It would not let me go until it was carried out of my body and onto the canvas.

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The bird is my mother, finally free from pain, weight, and the long labor of being human. Yet it is also me. As she rises, I rise with her, carrying the yellow fragments of our shared love inside my own becoming. These pieces are not broken; they are radiant. They hold every moment, every tenderness, every way we belonged to one another.

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The blues hold the vastness of grief: its quiet, its depth, its endlessness. They are the same blues as breath and sky and water, reminding us that sorrow and aliveness live in the same space. The painted border becomes a threshold, a sacred container for what is too much to hold all at once.

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This is not a painting about letting go. It is about how love transforms — how it lifts, how it remains, how it learns to fly.