She Came When I Called

The pain stopped the second I saw her.

Not gradually.

Not fading.

Gone.

Like someone had reached inside my body and turned off a switch I didn't know existed.

One moment I was drowning in the kind of pain that makes you question if your body is trying to kill you. The next, I was sitting in perfect stillness, watching my grandmother... who had been dead for two years... settle beside me like she'd never left.

Help me, I had whispered into the pain.

And she came.

Then Jesus appeared, walking up a hill with that cross, and I'm not even Christian like that anymore but my brain gave me what it thought I needed to see. What I could handle.

But I know who really answered.

The woman who crossed an ocean carrying nothing but faith.

Who buried her first child.

Who lost a twin and kept breathing.

Who knew what it meant to have your body betray the life you were trying to build.

She came when I called.

This was September 2020.

Three days after a doctor told me there was no heartbeat at eight weeks. Three days after she said, "Well, at least you know you can get pregnant," like loss could be consolation.

I was supposed to be having "cramping."

That's what they called it.

Cramping.

As if my body turning itself inside out, every cell screaming as it released what it had been building, was just some minor inconvenience.

A period with attitude.

I gripped herbal teas because I'd rather suffer than trust another medical professional with my pain. Hours that felt like lifetimes, until I couldn't hold it anymore and broke open, calling for help from anyone who might understand.

My grandmother appeared.

The pain vanished.

And I stopped questioning impossible things.

I tried to paint after.

Set up my easel like nothing had changed. Mixed the colors I'd always mixed. Lifted my brush to capture another woman's face... because that's what I did. Painted women. Always women. Always faces.

I could see something in their eyes that felt like recognition. Like pieces of myself scattered across different features, different stories, but somehow familiar.

My hand wouldn't move.

Not couldn't.

Wouldn't.

For weeks, I stared at blank canvases. The faces I'd always painted felt wrong now. Too contained. Too willing to keep secrets behind composed expressions.

Like they were lying about something I could finally see.

So I stopped trying to control what came out.

Bought tubes of paint and squeezed them straight onto canvas. Let colors crash into each other without asking. Dragged whatever I could find through wet pigment until something that felt like truth started emerging.

Not faces.

Not forms.

Just feeling made visible.

This was how I discovered that my hands had been waiting my whole life for the right kind of breaking.

I got pregnant again in February 2021.

This time my body was different. Stronger. Ready.

But birth is its own demolition.

My plans dissolved into emergency surgery, another loss of control that left me questioning everything I thought I knew about strength. Then came the fog I hadn't expected…postpartum depression seeping in like smoke until I was walking through my own life unable to see clearly.

So I painted my way through it.

Fifteen minutes a day with a newborn sleeping nearby.

Not because I wanted to, but because I would disappear if I didn't.

Abstract colors spilling across canvas like prayers I couldn't speak.

That's when I understood… this wasn't just what I was doing anymore.

This was who I was becoming.

I'm bringing figures back into my work now, but they're different.

Fragmented.

Reassembled.

Faces that suggest rather than insist.

Like I'm painting the feeling of being in a body rather than just the body itself. The way memory works... pieces floating, connecting, making sense only when you stop trying to force them into familiar shapes.

My daughter will grow up watching me make this kind of art.

She'll never know the version of me that made safe choices with dangerous hands.

I used to think healing looked like Jesus.

Turns out it looked like my grandmother…

“Curves Redefined” Acrylic on 20×20 canvas. Artwork by Tarra Lu