You Don’t Always Want to Play Alchemist

Art, I suppose, is when you create life and meaning and out of nothing, and not everyone in the world hates it at the same time.

You take the nothingness, thick and sticky, and you shape it. It’s fun and wonderful and imaginative, and it satisfies everyone’s fantasy of playing God. Creating new worlds from scratch is about recreating one’s own in the process, after all. Fiction is real life, if you know how to look at it. But to do that, you first have to take little pieces from your dark days and turn them into soft magic. You have to make the black come out of your dark caves and turn it into silver. You have to make emotions happen by trying them on first. And sometimes those emotions wear you down before you have a chance to play alchemist. And then.

You want to feel good, or feel bad, or not feel at all, and stop keeping track, making notes, reshuffling. You want to feel the rain on your skin, and good love underneath, and do absolutely nothing with the memories to come. You want them to always belong to you, but you don’t want to edit them and share them with the world. Ever. You want to walk across parking lots at midnight, hand in hand with someone who can teach you the art of having a loud heart and a quiet mind. You don’t want to tell a soul anything, or turn him into literature, or think about how this story ends best just yet. You just want to feel it and keep it all to yourself.

Sometimes your only real wish is outside of the wish jar you stare at every day, the one containing all the variations of ‘I want to make art.’ Some days you really don’t want that at all. You just want the world, beautifully simplified and without it baring its teeth at every turn. You want to live fully in it and not think about how to make the threats look poetic. The richness of the moment that you don’t want to feel guilty about not living, because you’re so busy thinking up ways to hold on to it long enough to turn it into your future. A lake, a hammock, burning hot coffee and the smell of used books. Open fields where you don’t have to sit down at your desk ruminate over memories of long-lost bliss and think about how best to use them to make it all visible to others.

Sometimes you just want to surrender to the moment and not think about what to do with its potential or its consequences. Perhaps art can follow that, too, like the loyalest of dogs.