Rose
I don’t know how long I had been working on the painting. Days and nights had bled together. All I knew was that I had to finish it. I had to get every detail out of my head and onto the mirror of the canvas. I had never painted myself before. Pieces of me had been in paintings, but I had never done a full portrait – and this was unlike any portrait I had ever painted. It was so much more than an image, it was as though I had captured my soul and my identity in the grotesque image. It was as if I had never really seen myself before. When I looked in the mirror every day I had seen some fake version of myself, that Rose who was just struggling to fit into the world like a square peg in a round hole. That old Rose who just wanted to survive, to be accepted, but who couldn’t ev
