My Art

My hate for my love of creativity is a painful, paradoxical impasse that I suffer through wordlessly and bitingly every moment I find a pen, a camera, or a paintbrush in my hand. I sit stationary in every moment that my fingertips scale the keys to make a tune. I have no answer as to why I choose to create with no primary intention, therefore a sense of harrowing discouragement crawls over my skin as deep, hollow chills do through thick flesh and sorely a heart. It is a lack of personal and necessary gain that debilitates my talents. My ability to find solace in art when the world around is eroding with showers of metal and fire is mitigated with every work conceived to merely live and die for oblivion in a soul-shattering immediacy. I am starving. I am young, but I am already starving.

How? How could the art of an adolescent actually serve a purpose? In what matter must it? Truthfully, it mustn’t. It is there for sole pleasure. Confined in the mind’s galleries and on the room’s walls, his art remains scattered and brings transient joy, for he has impressed himself and perhaps others. Their remarks, though not to his belief, could be feigned. Is he special? Is he a diamond in the rough? An obscure yearning that has hardened into an impenetrable expression? No. Not yet, at least. Is he independent of mind and genuine? On occasion, the words that flow from him and the frozen times that he captures are truly unique, and yet this cannot be so because his creations come from influence and inspiration. It hurts him to imagine that this is not only an educational experience, but a lasting handicap that withholds him from the stars we look up to and, by a powerful gravity, holds him sedentary among the millions of others who fight for the same future. And those who observe on the coasts of these crowds of composers, inventors, painters, sculptors, writers, photographers, actors, filmmakers, cooks, and designers… they warn, because they can see what the ingenious simply cannot. They see famine, but an imperturbable craving for the juiciest, ripest, and freshest opportunity to regain the strength they need to rise again and float among the stars. He is aware, for he is young and maturely cognizant of this crowd. But it frightens him.

When I look at myself from the outside, I do not see a boy genuinely ready for the success he hungers for. Already his stomach growls and his mouth waters. I cannot bare to imagine myself as that boy for the rest of my life. I perfectly enjoy my short-lived successes and achievements that I know many like me simply do not have the opportunity to have. This lifestyle of worldwide travel has not made me at all significantly more intriguing and extraordinary than other boys who share my talents and desires.

It frightens me. I starve for recognition that I do not yet deserve. I will not be able to bear it when my stomach will actually growl for food I cannot buy. I will wither away and the passive silence I maintained to endure an empty life, an empty art that would otherwise have color with a green that only flows when the audience loves it with you, will forever seal my mouth and my fate.