A Box Of Darkness…The Story Behind The Art

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” - Mary Oliver

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in a circle of bright, grounded women, all of us gathered on a Saturday to get quiet and listen to our intuition. We are paired up for an exercise in absolute silence. We are instructed to close our eyes, drop our awareness inward, and listen for the woman sitting across from us—and listen for ourselves, too.

I sink into the still water of that silence, waiting for whatever wants to surface. Right behind my eyes, etched in sharp, bold lines, a single word appears: HOLD.

I hear it. I feel the weight of it in my pulse. I have no idea what it is trying to tell me.

When the timer rings and we open our eyes, I look at my partner and smile, completely at ease. "Yeah, I'm seeing the word HOLD in all capital letters. I'm not sure what it means—if it's like a weightlifter with the strength of their hands wrapped around a barbell, or a pull-up, or like a pole dancer's grip on the pole. I don't really know, actually."

We laugh. I leave the circle feeling open, brave, and sovereign. That evening, I head to Zilker Park for an outdoor silent disco. My partner works long shifts in a physically demanding, high-risk environment where people get hurt on the job, so I am accustomed to maximizing my life solo. I dance on the lawn under the Texas sky, lost in my headphones, my feet in the grass.

At ten o’clock, I check my phone.

Three missed calls, back to back. One text message: Hey. Call me.

My throat tightens. In his line of work, that kind of frantic sequence means someone is bleeding, or someone is broken. A spike of panic surges through my chest. I dial his number immediately. It rings out. No answer.

I barely sleep. Morning arrives, and I open Instagram. A red badge marks the Message Requests. I tap into the "Other" folder.

“Hey, you don’t know me. I have been dating [his name] exclusively for over a year. Some things have come to the surface, we should talk. Sorry if this is a bit abrupt.”

I stare at the pixels. Total confusion. This doesn't make sense. It reads like a vindictive slander campaign, a bitter ex trolling, someone pulling a dirty, desperate stunt. We have had our bumps over the last three years—every December around my birthday, like clockwork, he would suddenly break things off, offering nothing more than: You did nothing wrong, this is just where it ends. And then he would return, and we would fold back into each other. But we don't fight. Gentleness has always been the cornerstone of our house. We treat each other's hearts with radical care.

Early on, he looked me in the eyes and made one explicit request: Hey, if your heart changes and you're no longer in this, please just don't let me be the last person to know.

"I just need to speak to him," I say aloud to the empty room. "This is just a misunderstanding."

I screenshot the message and text it to him. My hands are trembling so hard I can barely dial my best girlfriend. When she answers, my voice is an unstable wire. I tell her what came through my screen. He doesn't get off his shift until ten. I have hours to burn, and stewing in a quiet apartment will hollow me out. I decide to steward my body through movement.

I walk into the gym. Adrenaline is a chemical fire in my veins. I strap my feet into the rowing machine and pull the handle toward my sternum, driving my heels into the footplates.

A guy at the rower next to me looks over during a rest interval. "Does anybody have anything cool planned for this weekend?"

The words tear out of my mouth before I can filter them. "I'm about to figure out if my boyfriend of the last two and a half years is having an affair and if he's been cheating on me for the last year."

He lets out a shocked, startled laugh, eyes wide, totally rattled. I let out a dry sound too. Saying it out loud bleeds off just enough steam to keep my chest from detonating. But underneath the theatrical absurdity of the joke, the floor is already vaporizing. If that text is real, every piece of earth I have ever stood on is about to vanish, and the laws of gravity are gone.

My phone vibrates on the floor. His text: I'm coming home right now.

I drive back. I turn the key and step into the bedroom.

The morning light slants in from the right, illuminating dust motes hanging motionless in the air. The ceiling fan is off. The bed is made. The room is quiet, neat, and terrifyingly normal.

He is standing there, waiting for me.

His chest is caved in. His shoulders roll forward. His body is subtly angled away from me, refusing to square off, refusing to lock eyes. He looks like a dog waiting to be struck.

I look at him, waiting for his familiar, steady rhythm. Waiting for him to soften his face, wrap his arms around me, and say, I'm so sorry, this is an unhinged ex trying to poison us. It's a cruel mess, but I've got you.

I hold up the screen. "What is this message?"

His chin drops straight into his collarbone.

"I have betrayed your trust. I haven't been honest. I made a mistake."

Hot tears form in the bottom center of his eyes, pooling, flooding outward until the lids can't hold the weight. He blinks, and the tears fling themselves to their death. They barely touch his skin—they just drop straight to the floor to their ruin. Kamikaze tears.

I stare at the wet marks on the hardwood. Why are they falling? Is it shame? Is it grief over what he just incinerated? Is it the raw embarrassment of being caught because another woman blew up his fortress of lies before he could manage it? Or did he truly love me, trapped in a dark cycle he couldn't break?

The world doesn't detonate; it simply becomes unrecognizable. A baffling, freezing wave crashes over me. Why would he do this? We don't fight. What does she have that I don't? Why would he look anywhere else? I imagine him offering his body, his laughter, his sacred intimacy to a faceless stranger, sharing the exact sensuality I thought was ours alone.

He was the only man I ever trusted to hold my full weight when we danced. The only one.

Something ancient and cold wakes up at the base of my spine. The grief hardens into a coiled, serpentine fury. I step into his space, my voice dead-level, stripping away every ounce of mercy.

"I hope it was incredible. Because that experience cost you forty years. It cost you forty years of the best life you are never going to live now. It cost you your entire future with the most devoted woman who had your back. And you are never going to know what that's like."

He doesn't fight back. He looks down at the floorboards.

"I know," he says. The sadness in his voice is heavy enough to break bone.

He begins to plead. He asks how we can work this out, how we can salvage the wreckage, how we can find a way to stay together.

I call the woman.

Her voice on the phone fills in the map of an alternate reality. It wasn't an isolated mistake. They were together three to four nights a week. He slept at her house. They just came back from a trip to New York. I refuse to believe it until she sends the photo: the two of them, smiling together, with the Manhattan skyline stretching behind their shoulders.

The foundation is gone. I am a skeleton standing in a burned-out house.

The torture does not finish that morning; it stretches across the weeks that follow, arriving in ten thousand boring, mundane revelations. The memory of walking into the guest bathroom six months ago, wondering why my toothbrush, my hairbrush, and my bobby pins had been gathered up and tucked away under the sink. He never used that bathroom; I was the only one who did.

…She was using that bathroom, too.

The favorite Polaroid of us, suddenly missing from the living room wall. My clothes and suitcases, quietly moved into the guest closet while I was away across the country, sweating in the heat, trying to build a property for our future. The living room blinds, always kept stubbornly shut, blocking out the sun.

Every single memory is poisoned retroactively. Every sacred milestone of the last three years, tainted by calculated redirection.

I collapse into the care of a guardian angel of a friend. She takes me into her home and rehabilitates what is left of me. In those hollow weeks, she forces water past my chapped lips. She puts food in front of me and watches until I swallow. She sits with me in the dark until the wild animal in my chest stops thrashing and begins to breathe.

One afternoon, in the quiet aftermath of the ruin, I reach for paper and a stick of black charcoal.

Charcoal is what remains after life is subjected to suffocating heat. It is wood consumed by fire until every drop of moisture is gone, leaving only pure, dense carbon.

I grind that black ash across the white surface. I use my knuckles and the palms of my hands to drag the darkness across the sheet, building massive, towering slabs of freezing granite. Thick, monolithic walls that reflect absolute cold. I construct the exact tomb of deception and calculated secrecy that kept me trapped long before I knew the walls were there.

And then, right in the center of the dark vault, I carve the movement.

This piece is an image of a woman who is not mourning what burned. She is kicking and flying off the freezing granite tiles, hurling her entire body into the blinding, insurmountable light.

Being handed that box was pure agony. But seeing the box for what it was blew the door off its hinges. The word that came to me in the circle wasn't an instruction to grip tighter to a man who was vanishing; it was an order to hold my own center, to hold my spine, to hold steady while the false world fell away.

May this piece always remind you that no matter what darkness you may be living through or have lived through, the light is always waiting to receive you.