2025.

The voice grows louder as I walk away booming, relentless. The colours that once invited me begin to shimmer and distort, playing tricks on my eyes. I keep walking. Slowly, the grip loosens. The colours fade, like wallpaper in a child’s bedroom untouched for decades. A space preserved in nostalgia, unchanged, unchallenged. I realise I’ve been frozen in time held captive by the illusion that the past is still the present.

I take a deep breath. One final breath. And I blow it out, like extinguishing a solitary candle on a birthday cake. In that moment, the past lifts vanishing in a soft billow of smoke.

This piece is a meditation on emotional release, the seductive comfort of memory, and the quiet violence of transformation. Witness my moment of realisation that the illusion is not real and that truth allows me to be free.