Some days, the routine is off. She's somehow less visible within the home, and Father isn't all that eager to be around. It feels lonely on those days, as if the loneliness clings to the walls and refuses to leave. It's why there's so much stuff, and stuff makes it less easy to see the loneliness as if the pile up just blocks out the sadness that creeps along the walls and clings to the games, to the books, to the boring conversations on loop.
Emilie and Gabriel might as well not even be home, as Adrien can never find them. Sometimes though, Emilie's parents come over, and Adrien is learning to dance like his mother had learned to dance or he's trying to get them to loosen up, or they bring over his mother's old paintings, and Adrien gets lost in the color of it. Those days, the walls leak less sadness, but it's still somehow not enough.
Adrien likes waking up before his mother and getting both of his parents up. He likes the days when Emilie has no work left to do, and she'll just pose in pictures with him for fun. Everything becomes an image far too soon though, and Adrien gets used to the motony of repeated images much like a picture book, haphazardly read on a busy day, or a camera lens always flashing to catch its next still life. Adriens knows the importance of pictures whether sketches of his father's designs, always waiting that final image, where a model is adorned in the full color of it, and captured by the flashing of a camera lens.
Adrien knows that even the routine has images that long hours ticked by on a clock matter somehow, and that when he is playing a game by himself, that that's an image, the image of an entertained child, even though it almost always feels like not enough. That feeling is masked when his mother plays the games with him, even though she's nowhere near as good at them as he is; she only plays with her son, never grew up with a game system. She grew up with paints and pencils and charcoal, and she grew up putting images to a canvas or to paper, though now she is the image and the pencil is rather the camera and not held in her hands.
Adrien wonders when the images change so fast, but he's always been the camera's painting, since his baby photos, and the pictures he and his mother take and the odd moment when his father needs a child to model his clothes that he's designed. So, images matter, and he doesn't whine or complain when he doesn't see his parents, just tries to smile, until the day when he won't see his mother again. That day, after the pain of masking his feelings under a bright smile, and only seeing his father wears down on him. That was never the routine, nor the image after all, and finally, alone in his room, he cries, not imagining that even there he's an image.
The image of a forgotten son, the image of heartache, and the last image that his father sees of him before going to sleep. The image that is, eventually his father's undoing, and the image that Adrien feels instead of sees, that pushes him into a longing for something to break this chain of bitterness.