There are conversations that never reach the ears. Whole languages, silent but fluent, spoken only with the body. As children, we knew this language instinctively. We clung to our parents when frightened, held hands on the playground, pressed our foreheads against cold windows to show longing. Touch was our mother tongue. But as we grew older, words grew louder. In a culture that prizes independence, we are taught to suppress this tactile fluency, to distrust vulnerability, to mask intimacy beneath layers of irony and distance. And yet, in moments of grief or joy, that language returns to us unbidden. A hand on the back. A head rested on a shoulder. No translation needed.
Agnes Cecile’s watercolor Tenderness brings this unspoken grammar to the surface. It is a portrait not of faces, but of gesture—two figures merged in quiet embrace, one holding a small bouquet of red flowers. Their bodies are rendered in delicate blues and greens, melting into one another like pooled memory. The painting blurs the line between one body and the next, suggesting unity rather than separation. Arms cross, hands wrap gently around forearms, heads incline inward. The red flowers, the only bold color in the work, anchor the moment with their vivid presence—perhaps a symbol of love, grief, or remembrance.
What strikes me most is the way the figures lean. It is not dramatic. Not staged. One figure rests their head into the other's neck, not to be seen, but to feel. It is an act of trust. A silent declaration: I am here, and so are you. Cecile’s use of watercolor, with its natural tendency to bleed and blur, perfectly captures the dissolving boundaries between self and other. The bodies are not outlined with certainty; they flow. Like emotions. Like time.
And when I look at this painting, I realize what I’m missing isn’t just another person—it’s that kind of surrender. That unspoken safety. That language I never truly learned to speak. I have known affection. I’ve shared beds, shared secrets, even shared futures that never came to pass. But tenderness? That kind of tenderness—the vulnerable, anchoring kind—has always been just out of reach.
It’s strange, missing something you’ve never had. There’s no photo to hold, no memory to revisit, no story to tell. Just a persistent awareness of a shape in your life where something soft should be. I used to think this feeling was grief. But grief has an object. This is something else. A kind of absence that behaves like presence.
Psychology has names for this. John Bowlby called it attachment longing—a fundamental human need to feel securely connected, physically and emotionally. We are wired to seek closeness, to reach for safe harbors. When that need goes unmet, especially early on, we adapt. Some of us become anxious, craving intimacy but doubting its permanence. Others become avoidant, numbing the desire altogether. And some of us hover in the middle, hungry but hesitant.
I’ve often found myself somewhere between. Wanting closeness, but unsure what to do with it. Wondering if love, for me, would always feel like something I had to earn.
The psychologist Rollo May once wrote that “to love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive—to grief, sorrow, and disappointment... to the possibility of becoming the wound.” That might be the crux of it. To receive tenderness, we must allow ourselves to be touched in places we have spent years protecting.
Still, the ache remains. As Esther Perel observes, “Longing is the poetic expression of desire.” It’s not just lack—it’s the story we wrap around the lack. Longing turns absence into meaning. It keeps love alive, even when love has no form.
Additional, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum once wrote, “Love is not just a feeling. It is a hunger for the presence of the beloved, a craving for closeness and touch.” But what if you’ve only ever read the menu and never tasted the meal? What if you’ve watched others feed each other from across the room, hands brushing, and wondered if you were meant to dine alone?
Still, I have touched tenderness in other forms. In friendship. In family. In the quiet trust between teacher and student. In the moment a friend lingers after a hard conversation just long enough for you to feel un-alone. And yet, romantic tenderness—that devotional touch, that shoulder leaned on without apology—has eluded me. Not through fault, not through failure. Just absence. The way some people are born into snowy climates and others never see snow.
There is a mercy in Tenderness, and a quiet ache. The painting does not demand that I feel left out. It simply shows me what is possible. It holds space for a kind of love that is gentle and present, and in doing so, it invites me to imagine—not just what has been, but what could be.
In the end, maybe that is the most tender act of all: to let ourselves long. To admit, without shame, that we want to be held like this. To press our loneliness against the soft edges of watercolor and say, yes, this is what I mean.
What I have wanted is simple, really: time, togetherness, touch. I’m not ashamed to want it. I just don’t know if it will ever be mine. And maybe the wanting itself is a kind of love—a shape I carry, a room I keep prepared. Not empty. Just waiting.