It's strange, almost unsettling, to realize that we will never truly know the very first works of our favorite artists ever made. Not the work that found an audience, but the one that existed only in private. Born in quiet, dismissed in quiet, and buried there. The beginnings that existed before courage did. The first song they ever formed, unheard by anyone, because it was judged too harshly and silenced by their own belief that it wasn't good enough. Lyrics written on paper that never found their melody, words that stayed words that existed briefly before being folded away, forgotten, or abandoned, separated forever from the sound they were meant to become.
There are stories sleeping in documents no one has opened in years—an entire constellation of thought—they wait inside old documents, carrying half-finished emotions, and unresolved endings. Universes with their own gravity, their own skies, their own characters who once lived vividly in imagination. Characters who had histories, dreams, and destinies waiting to unfold. Stories that breathed for a moment before the creator lost the courage or the will to continue. Characters frozen mid-scene, suspended in a single moment, waiting for the sentence that would have allowed them to move forward. No words came, and so they stayed where they were, because there were no more words to set them free.
The same is true for those who paint. The canvases that were never touched, or the first sketches that were hidden away, deemed unworthy of light. Colors that were imagined but never mixed. Strokes that trembled with uncertainty and were erased before they could exist. How many first sketches were left unfinished at the corner of a page? How many canvases were covered over, erased, or hidden because the artist believed they were not yet worthy of being seen?