Love, 2025

Julie Panch  

This work reflects on the quiet grief of a relationship that ends not because love has disappeared, but because two people ultimately choose different paths.

The accompanying poem uses the image of a shared blanket as a metaphor for intimacy, care, habit, and the fragile fabric of everyday life built together over time. Through ordinary domestic details, it explores how love can survive countless small ruptures, yet still fail when two people can no longer move in the same direction.

Rather than focusing on conflict, the work is concerned with tenderness, memory, and the painful recognition that love alone is not always enough to keep two lives intertwined.

«If love is a patchwork quilt,
can it be mended?»
But the quilt was not patchwork —
just an ordinary one,
perhaps from IKEA.
The duvet cover was definitely from there —
simple, striped, like everyone else's.
They slept together,
covered themselves together,
sometimes tickling each other's feet.
Feet wandering where they shouldn't,
getting tangled in the opening of the duvet cover,
tearing off the buttons.
They put them in a box
and never sewed them back on.
And then — they began to divide it.
Each pulled the quilt toward themselves
to keep warm.
Instead of embracing...
They kept pulling.
The seams strained
on that same striped IKEA cover.
But more often, they did embrace.
They washed it in the machine
at 1400 rpm,
then hid it wrinkled in a dresser,
guarding it like the apple of their eye.
And then again — half-asleep,
they pulled it tight,
kicked it off the bed with their feet —
too hot.
Pulling, pushing...
But they mended it.
They mended it — because
they loved.
They moved to a country
where IKEA was not closed.
Bought the same one.
Tore it again —
but the thread ran out.
Or the needle grew dull.