I’ve started labeling them, you know. The canvases. Like some goddamn museum archivist, though a particularly morbid one. “Unfinished: The Redwoods, Summer ’23.” Or, “WIP: Portrait of Eleanor, ’24.” It feels… not right. It feels like an admission of defeat, a concession to the relentless march of time that I always thought I could outrun with enough caffeine and stubbornness. My therapist, a young woman who still believes in CBT and all that shit, would probably call it a manifestation of existential dread or some such psychological jargon. I just know it feels like I’m leaving a goddamn mess behind. It’s this fear, this cold, creeping certainty that I’m going to drop dead right here in the studio, a brush still in my hand, leaving behind a room full of half-formed ideas and incoherent beginnings. What a fucking legacy that would be. Decades of work, years of trying to translate the chaos of the world onto a stretched piece of linen, and it all amounts to a pile of partially realized sketches. During my time in the corps, we had protocols for everything. Every operation, every piece of equipment, every casualty. There was a clear beginning, middle, and end, even if the end was often a gut-wrenching tragedy. There was a sense of completion, of task accomplished, however grim. This… this is just an open-ended fuck-you from the universe. And what’s worse is the thought of someone finding them, these labeled ghosts. Some poor bastard from my estate, pawing through my life’s work, and seeing only fragments. Will they even understand? Will they see the intention behind the half-rendered landscapes, the nascent expressions on the faces of strangers I barely knew but felt compelled to capture? Or will it just be a chaotic jumble, the ramblings of an old woman who couldn’t finish what she started? God, what a pathetic final statement. It makes me chuckle, actually, in a dark kind of way. All that discipline, all that structure instilled by years of military life, and in the end, I’m just another civilian leaving behind an unorganized pile of shit. It’s almost funny. Almost.