The light arrives before the answer does.
A figure stands at the edge of a sunrise, small against a sky that has already decided to be warm. The plate is built out of paint and gold — burnt orange at the top, amber underneath, a horizon that never quite resolves into a line. Nothing in it is still: the light swells once across the whole plate, the colour drifts a few degrees, and the surface itself moves the way wet paint moves when you tilt the canvas. The figure holds while everything around it breathes, which is the whole story: standing in a morning that keeps arriving whether or not anyone comes back.
The question in the title is not a sad one. It is the question you ask a room that is full of light.