wip

Those who suffer are the best artists.

That's what I was told all my life. That if I had never experienced hardship, I'd never be anything artistically; I'd just end up wallowing in a cave of my own happiness and writing dreck that nobody would pay a dime of attention to. This hallowed rhetoric was all I could think about each time I'd try to create a piece... some kind of writing that would give myself a name. But it seemed like for all the voices I'd heard they had been correct, and they were all telling truths that went without necessitating validation.

So, for a grand period of my life, I lived in the slum of rebellion, where the world in all my rose-tinted glasses was an oyster of reflection, and I could do nothing but give unto it glory. I couldn't stop myself from writing these long-winded pieces about the abstract nature of its beauty and the way the voices of women singing silk to my young, open ears would melt the shadows away before me and give me light in the darkest of hours. It seemed to me like such a glorious phase would never end, but I knew that soon I would be met with the need to step out of the brightest corners and find my way into the darkened centre of our hive -- the place in which all human communication was born and deigned with sentience, the place where the rhetoric of our moral values would be born and killed again and again.

And so I wandered like a young bird with its wings clipped around the strata of this intellectual deep-end... I began to think that if I would never give myself a voice of reputation, a kind of badge of war-torn glory, like I had been in the military for years, I would never make it in art, I would never make it in anything. And to some extent, they were right... I was never going to make anything out of what I had before, nothing out of the glorious conception of glamour I had tried so desperately to craft in the brightest of hours.

I began to torture myself, slowly, removing any kind of pleasure until I revealed from myself a dark spirit, a hedonistic creature that couldn't exist without an ascetic narcissism that bled out upon the gallows of creation. I spent hours in the sweat and tears of toil and service, and I never created anything worth a dime. I cut off limbs of my soul, the digits of my connection to the merry nature of drinking with my family and friends in unlit bars and wandering the streets with the best-natured sirens that money could possibly go to waste for. I lost myself in this vortex of destruction. I was no longer a happy creature... no longer a creature that could feel abstract joys, moreso a creature who felt cheated of the compassion of reality...

I wandered the streets, lost, afraid, without kin. I was never going to find my way back. But was there a way I wanted to see..