on loving

here’s the thing about loving art.

it’s like you’re eating crushed glass as though it were candy, and waiting for the tiny molten pieces to prod, poke and pierce into your veins. it’s like consuming death, not all at once - but as though it were a cup of tea you’re nursing with a friend over old conversations and new promises. you swirl it around at first, breathe in the sweet sweet air and then let it run down your throat. hot. heavy. healing.

here’s the thing about loving art:

it’s knowing you’re no longer in control of your destiny - not like you ever were in the first place - but it’s signing off the meager amounts of it you have in hopes of something bigger, something better, something that will never come.

loving art comes with breaking hearts, there’s a reason they sound so similar.

don’t tell me you’re in love with stories until you write the wrong one. don’t tell me you’re in love with the poets until you become one. don’t tell me you can write until you learn to read. don’t tell me you can breathe until you can hear the heart you broke festering under every step you take. until you take all the people who have dared to love you and immortalized their sin in gold-plated letters. don’t tell me you love art until you can hear the light playing with the shards of glass as it enters the crevices of your heart from which it spilt.

here’s the thing about loving art.

you never really know where it ends. art consumes you with pain, and then there comes this precise form of grief: a longing for all the lives you touch but you know you could never reach. art brings with it hate. art brings with it angst. art brings with it a polite kind of suffering. it carries to you in tentative whispers the realization that all of us no matter how stupid and tired and sexy and broken and rich and poor and lonely and helpless - all of us, no matter how human - do not matter. that we make up everything enough to be nothing. that we both are and are not. can and cannot be.

that we shouldn’t exist and so somehow it is a blessing - oh thank the holy lords - that somehow we fucking do.