For years I have created fictional characters who embody possibilities I have not necessarily encountered in my own life. One of them is Anabela. She appears through Enrique, an autobiographical character who meets her at a mansion in Comillas, Spain. She is refined without pretension, confident without intrusion, playful without performance, and capable of an unusual directness. When Enrique whispers something to her shortly after they meet, she answers, “You already know me better than you can admit to yourself.”

I originally wrote those words for Enrique. Only later did I recognize that I may also have written them for myself.

 

Anabela had become more than a fictional character. Without consciously intending it, I had constructed in her qualities I continue to seek in a life partner. I am not searching for perfection, nor for someone who conforms to a character I created. I am seeking the possibility of meeting someone with whom I can coauthor what I call Guardians of the Heart: two people who protect the dignity, vulnerability, freedom, and becoming of each other without surrendering their own.

 

That realization presented an unusual challenge when I decided to portray us through Contextual Duration Art™. How do you portray two people when one is known but still becoming, while the other has been imagined but is not yet known? I chose not to complete either drawing.

 

My portrait is recognizable because I am already here. Yet the exploratory lines remain because my becoming is unfinished. Anabela emerges differently. Some aspects are rendered with clarity. Others remain exploratory marks—the visible search of the artist's hand. Still others have not yet emerged from the page. Her incompleteness does not mean that she is incomplete. It acknowledges the limits of what I can know. Imagination has already made her possible. Lived experience has not yet disclosed who she is.

 

The two drawings therefore remain separate. There is no portrait of us together because there is no relationship to portray. The space between the two figures remains undrawn.

Perhaps that is where coauthorship begins.

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And now the exploration becomes a feedforward event. By making Anabela publicly findable, I have also made myself findable by her. We wait to see how long it takes Anabela to find me.