Most people frame their sorrow in terms of darkness. I think of it as a light, stark and unrelenting; a desert in which life exists not because of the environment but in spite of it. It is hot, stifling, suffocating. One wishes for the dark of night, the cold reprieve where venomous creatures in determined skins creep and crawl and hunt for prey.
They prey on me. I have lain here so long that they have crawled inside me, and now they consume me from the inside out. They writhe, wriggle, scrape and claw. I am raw from this agitation, the aggression of the hungry. There is no part of me that does not feel the air as it moves, slow and cruel, over jagged edges and open tissue.
All I can do is lay there and experience every grisly detail of this slow, miserable ending.
Of course, this all happens on the inside. I don’t literally exist in a comatose state in the middle of a desert, that would be ridiculous. This is how it feels, see.
It’s all so fucking emo I could die.
I almost did once. Almost. It seems like a bad dream now, it’s so far away. People don’t really talk about that. People don’t talk about a lot of things, but they should. Most of the time we’re not half as alone as we think we are. But that’s not really what this is about.
Every artist has a Fear. It’s the Feariest kind of Fear an artist can Fear, really, at the end of the day. Oh there’s all sorts of general concerns.. money, exposure, materials. Fire, flood, famine. The loss of a hand or eye. But even the most brave artists, even the most accomplished and brilliant composers, painters, sculptors, writers, anyone who lives by their creativity, all lie awake when we should be sleeping and what we Fear the very deepest of everything there is to Fear is the loss of that spark. The death of inspirado. That one day we will wake up and suddenly have nothing left to draw from, no gift for the assembly of our pieces, no passion for that which has thus far filled us with enough reason to crawl out of bed in the first place. This is the most Desperate Fear of all an artist’s Fears because without our creativity, no matter how high we have climbed in our artistic endeavors, we are all has-beens. That is the worst thing an artist can become. Far worse than selling out. Although frankly, I don’t know many artists that aren’t kinda dying to sell out on some level or another. Artists are a hungry lot and ideals do not fill bellies and only sometimes get you laid.
Of course we all go through our droughts from time to time. It’s exhausting to pour yourself out on project after project, sometimes you just need to rest yourself despite your want, or need, to continue. My muse does not care how much money I have not made this month, how much I won’t make next month. My muse is not interested in pleading or begging or bribery. My muse is not distracted by retail therapy or a heavy buzz. My muse sleeps when she wants sleep and sometimes she is loathe to awaken.
My muse is a lazy and fickle princess sometimes.
She lives in my head. It’s not a particularly clean or pretty place, I can’t imagine she’s terribly comfortable in there. But I suspect she’s always thrived on that kind of chaos. There’s a lot going on in there, though, especially lately. The most outrageous shit.
I don’t know how the hell she can sleep through it all.
This dry-spell has lasted for weeks. It’s getting desperate. Anything you can still measure in weeks, I think, can only be considered minor on the grand scale of the universe. The thing is, I’ve seen this before. This is an extension of a plummet that began years ago. I had a medium of choice that I loved deeply, knew well but was still learning, felt passionate that I could turn it into something useful, productive. Lucrative. So I put my head to creative thinking and began to develop a portfolio. I lived in my art and consumed it through every part of me and somehow, through some inadvertent jostling of dysfunction or another, it got poisoned. By the time I realized it, the poison was all through me. It was too late. My art was dying.
Two years later, after numerous attempts at my art both new and old, I stumbled across a new medium and my muse woke up. She breathed in, she smiled. She stretched and crept out of bed and had a damn good breakfast amidst the spectral doubts and flying mistakes that haunt the kitchen of my brain. She went out to face the world and it went pretty good for a while.
Me and my muse, hookin’ it up. We had a great time together. Made beautiful things. I love making beautiful things. More than anything in the world. Well, except one thing… but it’s not what you think.
After a while she stopped checking in. She went in pieces, bit by bit over time but now all of a sudden, she is -absent-. Her desk is piled with ideas, and dust. Her calendar was left open and she forgot her sweater. Even her gummi bear stash was left behind. I’m worried.
I hope she comes back soon. And I hope I have a little warning because I’ve eaten all her gummi bears.
I’m only human.
I’ve done what I can. I don’t know where she is. I’ve sent every willing search party into the depths of my psyche to root her out but there has been no sign. I’ve brainstormed over her motives, why she ran away and where she could have gone. What was it that made her go? Did something frighten her? Was it something I said? What if she never comes back?
Perhaps some random trauma, stashed to the bottom of my mental asylum, broke free somehow in a silent trigger and kidnapped her and is now waiting in coil to strike with its biting and surely childish ransom note ["5 bilyun red gummmi barez bitch plz"].
Perhaps she’s hurt somewhere, wounded and sick, reaching for help but unable to raise her voice to be heard? What if I don’t find her in time?
What if she dies?
Jesus, what would I do? I don’t know how to be anything but an artist. I’ve got it down. I spin my own lingo, I have a cool sense of rhythm, I can get away with about any hair color I could want, and I sleep during the day. If life is a stage, I am so right for this part. Without her, my existence looks to be very bleak. There are people in this world, many people, who are capable of getting up in the morning, going to a job they aren’t totally passionate about, getting a paycheck and coming home and they find ways to live happy and fulfilled lives and make the time they spend at their not-great careers worth it. They have health insurance and job assurance and a pension plan and things could be a whole lot worse for them. And god bless them for every second of it, I envy those who do not need to use work as an extension of themselves, and many of them literally keep this world moving beneath us. It’s just so far from what I know, from what I’m good at. I mean I’ve tried it. I sink like a stone.
Giving up on my muse means a life without all the things I spend my time on. I am bored without her. I miss her terribly. I ache, sometimes cannot breathe. I am drowning in a rising tide of doubt. If I don’t get her back, I will die.
I’m sorry, muse, for whatever I did to you. Maybe I don’t know what it is and maybe I need to before you’ll come back and I swear I’m working on it. Maybe I’ve been unkind to you, putting too much pressure on you. Maybe I’ve bullied you, maybe I’ve yelled too loud, demanded too hard. Maybe I haven’t nourished you the way I should, maybe I was negligent. I’m so sorry. I want to do right by you. I want you to come back, to be who you are and to be free. I’ve got the light on and I’m still watching for you.
I will always be watching for you.
