My Mr. Artist

Epilogue II

Kiyah

Two years. Sometimes it feels unreal when I say it out loud, how time stretched and folded itself around us, how it healed without ever announcing that it was doing so. 

After we both resigned, the world became our home. Every other month brought a new place, a new country, a new culture, a new rhythm. Sometimes it was a quiet coastal town where mornings smelled of salt and freshly baked bread. Sometimes it was crowded cities, languages tangling in the air, inspiration living on every street corner. Other times, it was mountains so vast they made our worries feel embarrassingly small. And always.....just the two of us.

There were no expectations placed on us, no labels imposed by society, no roles to perform. It was simply Ansh and me, learning each other again, away from the noise that had once broken us. Those months weren't an escape; they were a return. A slow, necessary return to ourselves.

Ansh found his way back to art gradually, not all at once. It returned to him in fragments, like muscle memory waking after a long sleep. He reconnected with his teacher first, who welcomed him back with quiet pride and steady guidance; meeting him, I understood why Ansh still called him Guru. Then came the old clients, the team that had always been waiting, never doubting his return. 

Slowly, his brush stopped shaking. His eyes began to light up again. The silence he carried softened, no longer hollow, but thoughtful. About half a year in, our travels changed too. Destinations were no longer chosen at random; they followed his work now, countries shaped by inspiration, cities dictated by exhibitions, commissions, and collaborations.

Somewhere between staying and leaving, between places and pauses, I made a decision of my own. I enrolled in a master's program in business architecture, online. It gave me freedom without stagnation, growth without roots. Those two years were strange that way—free, but not careless; restful, but not idle. 

And slowly, almost without me noticing, the doubts I carried began to dissolve. The fear that he would leave again. The fear that love would fracture under reality. The fear that I was choosing pain wrapped in beauty. They faded, not because he made grand promises, but because he showed up. Every single day. In the small, unremarkable ways that mattered most.  

The mask he once wore, the blankness, the emotional distance, the hollow silence that clung to him, slowly peeled away. He laughed again, freely, like the sound had been waiting years to return. And when he touched me, it was no longer with hesitation or fear, but with certainty, like a man no longer afraid of losing what he loved, because he had finally learned how to hold it.

And somewhere along the way, I realized something, we had both been slaves to uncertainty, fear of loss, fear of repeating old wounds, fear of loving too deeply and being left hollow again. We kept mistaking that fear for something that needed fixing. But it didn't. What we needed was space. Space to breathe. Space to rediscover ourselves not as fragments of the past, but as two people choosing each other again—slowly, intentionally, without pressure.

But now... 

Something in me has shifted. I find myself craving stillness. I want roots. I want something called home, my home, our home. I want my people close enough to touch. I want to build something that doesn't fit into a suitcase. I want more.

And that thought scares me. Because I don't know if wanting more makes me selfish, or just honest. I don't know if asking to settle means asking him to give something up, or asking us to finally step into something we've been circling for years. All I know is this: for the first time in a long time, I'm not afraid of losing him. I'm afraid of standing still at the edge of everything we could become, and not reaching for it.