In a World Without Me, Only the Drawings Remain

Morning comes. Trains run, people head to work. Somewhere two people meet, somewhere two people part, somewhere a new life begins.

I am not in that scene.

Sometimes I imagine the world after my death. Events I will never know about keep happening, and everything moves forward as though nothing had occurred. The thought leaves me slightly cold.

For me, the ending of this consciousness is close to the ending of everything. Seen from the world's side, ordinary days simply continue after one person is gone. There is loneliness in that. There is also something warm in it, when I think of the time still ahead for the people I love, and for people I have never met.

Then again, the world I live in now is made of what countless people left behind before leaving it.

Not only painters and writers whose names are known. The person who built the desk I use. The person who paved the road I walk every day. The person who handed someone else a word, or a habit. We live surrounded by the traces of lives we never knew.

What remains does not have to be an achievement. A meal made for someone. A sentence said without thinking. A way of seeing passed from one person to another. Even after a name is forgotten, the small change that person made in the world can remain, in a different shape.

Since I began drawing, I have thought more concretely about the fact that the work will outlast me.

Say a black cat or a wolf I drew hangs in someone's room, far from here. That person passes it every morning, and now and then stops to look. Years later, someone who has never seen my face or heard my voice finds their own feeling inside the picture.

At that point the work is no longer my explanation of anything. It has left me, and it lives as part of someone's ordinary day.

Honestly, I want my work to last. What I want to last is not the name. The hours I spent feeling, thinking, and moving my hand might reach the emotion of a person I will never meet, through a single drawing. That possibility is what draws me.

A drawing does not need to change anyone's life. It may only stop them for a few seconds. It may only remind them of something they cannot put into words, or touch a feeling they had not noticed in themselves. Even so, something remains in those few seconds.

When I work in charcoal, I repeat the same two acts over and over. Leaving, and erasing.

I lay down black, smudge it, erase it, layer it again. A line I thought I had removed stays faintly, and that trace gives the surface its depth. A finished drawing holds more than the lines that survived to the end. What I erased along the way is also there. Even where the eye cannot see it clearly, everything done before supports the next black, and the next empty space.

A life resembles this a little.

Looking only at where I stand now, it might seem I appeared here one day out of nowhere. In fact there were hours when I could not draw well, lines pulled while unsure, drawings I showed to no one. I stand on what that earlier version of me left behind.

That earlier self is also someone who is no longer here. Even so, what I was absorbed in then, and what I chose, remain as traces inside me. The question of what survives after death does not belong only to the distant future. Every day we live by receiving what we ourselves left yesterday.

I was never a being whose existence was decided in advance.

The world continued for a long time before I was born. I feel no loneliness about my absence from those years. Countless coincidences overlapped, and only now, I am here. It seems obvious, and it is actually very strange.

So I do not draw in order to defeat death. Because I know death cannot be defeated, I face the paper in front of me today.

Rather than straining to make something that lasts for centuries, I try not to treat today's drawing carelessly. Whether that single sheet survives is not mine to decide. Paper deteriorates, memory fades, names blur. Still, what is born during the hours of drawing may pass to someone, and something else may be born from there.

Someday, in a world without me, someone will stand in front of a drawing.

That person does not need to know me. They only find something of themselves in the picture and pause, just slightly. If that moment happens, the time I spent alive and drawing has changed shape and connected to their present.

It is not the same as living forever.

Still, the fact that I was here goes on moving, faintly, inside someone else's time. For me, that is probably what it means to remain.

I want these drawings and words to travel openly, and to reach the people who may need them.

If something here resonates with you, a paid subscription helps me continue making work, writing honestly, and keeping this space alive.

Thank you for reading.

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