Hey,
There is a famous painting by Marc Chagall called Birthday.
If you have ever seen it, you never quite forget it.
A young man and a woman are inside a simple, humble room. The table is set with bread and fruit. The windows are open to the summer air.
And right in the middle of the room, the man is floating.
He hasn't just lifted an inch off the floorboards, his body is soaring up to the ceiling, twisting in mid-air, swooping down to press a kiss to the woman's lips.
His feet aren't touching anything.
Gravity has completely stopped working.
The painting isn't a fairy tale. It actually happened.
It was July 1915. Chagall was twenty-eight years old, living in a small, dusty studio in Russia, and he had completely forgotten his own birthday.
He had no money. The world outside was in chaos, and he was sitting alone, stressed and overwhelmed, staring at a blank canvas with no idea how he was going to survive.
Then the wooden door opened, and his fiancée, Bella, walked in.
She hadn't spent any money on an expensive gift, she couldn't afford to. But she had gathered wild flowers from the side of the road, and she was carrying colorful shawls to drape over the dingy furniture so his studio wouldn't look so sad.
She had walked all the way across town simply because she didn't want him to spend his day feeling alone.
Chagall looked at her standing there with those flowers, bringing color into his gray afternoon, and something broke open inside him.
He didn't say a polite thank you. He didn't even grab a vase.
He told her not to move, picked up his brushes, and began to paint.
Years later, Bella wrote about that exact afternoon in her memoir:
"You did not move from the spot... Suddenly you took me off the ground and you flew yourself. You jumped up, you stretched out at full length and you flew to the ceiling... You reached the ceiling and we floated together over the room."
He painted them floating because being loved by someone who truly sees you is the only thing in this world that can make you forget how heavy life is.
For the rest of his life, through decades of displacement and exile, Chagall kept painting Bella flying.
Over rooftops. Through clouds. Across dark night skies.
He never forgot the feeling of that modest room in 1915, when a handful of wild flowers made a heavy world weightless.
It is easy to let life pull our eyes down to the floor. We get tired. We get distracted by the noise.
But every now and then, the person who loves you walks into your room just to make your day a little softer.
And when they do, the only thing that matters is looking up from your worry and letting yourself float.
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Warmly,
Little Love Diary Team
