Anca Dunavete

Art, I suppose, is when you create life and meaning 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 your deepest fantasy of playing God. Creating new worlds from scratch is about recreating your 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 crawl 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. You hate it when that happens.

At times you just want to feel good, or feel bad, or not feel at all, and stop keeping track, making notes, reshuffling. To feel the rain on your skin and good love underneath and do absolutely nothing with the memories to come. For them to always belong to you, without the need to edit and share them with the world.

You want to walk across parking lots at midnight, hand in hand with someone who can teach you all about the art of having a loud heart and a quiet mind at the same time. You don’t want to tell a soul, you just want to feel it and keep it all to yourself. You don’t want to want to turn him into chick lit.

Some days, your most real wish is outside the wish jar you stare at every day – the one containing all the variations of I want to make art. You don’t want to make art at all, you’re tired of that. You just want the world, beautifully simplified, without it baring its teeth at every turn. Have you got this down?

You want to live fully in it, without feeling guilty for not making the threats look poetic. You want the richness of the moment – not the kind you dissect and preserve, but the kind you simply exist within. A lake, a hammock, burning hot coffee, the smell of used books. Not having to sit down at your desk and ruminate over long-lost bliss and how to use it to make others see what you saw.

Sometimes you just want to surrender to the moment and not weigh its potential or worry about its consequences. Because while you might want to take life and turn it into art now and then, you don’t always want to play the alchemist. Sometimes, you just want to play.