Memory Eternal

There’s a point when Bruce Wayne
no longer needs the
mask of conventional life.

Someone I have loved described me as "an entirely emotional being" who "lives entirely for love". They got it right. Where that path led me is living entirely for art. Being immersed in it, open and emotionally vulnerable to it, all the time. I've helped enough people with their art, and I'm glad I could, wanting to fill the world with it, but now I make my own, and it necessitates this farewell. I had to strip off the disguise. Put an end to the charade. I had to swim or be broken forever. I had to let myself be the thing I wanted for the world and make what I wanted to give, even if it was embarrassing.

Those who know me know where to look.

“You’re trying not to be weird.
That’s why you can’t write what
you want. But you ARE weird.

You’re GOING to be weird. You’re
an artist. So stop that.”
— (my first fiction coach)

Life fact: I have starved three times in my life. Gaunt as a shadow, stoic and silent, but privately weeping from exhaustion and the bitterness of the world, and from shame of being abandoned to it by those who should have loved me. And I have written a book about starving, and the ways we starve. I didn’t know what starving was until I understood what food is. Now I’ve chosen a hunger that never starves, and the world is full, not of bitterness but everything. Love included.

A related story: When I was a boy, my boat was blown up, and other boys cried out in the water, drowning and dying, and I couldn’t tow any more of them to shore. I had to swim. It is my deepest shame, that I wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t better. That I couldn’t carry any more on my back. What I know of myself is that, eventually, I will swim. I live with that pain and that knowledge. I honor my fallen dead as best I can. I honor them best, which is beyond my understanding, by continuing to swim. They cry out for life, and if I don’t take it when I can, even when it’s hard, I spit on their memory. The work of putting your emotions into everything deliberately and honestly, making it a life and being authentic in everything, is hard. The world tells you to quit, or why bother, or throws shit at you for it. They strafe the water for survivors. But I am more than just a survivor. Therefore, in joy and wonder, bewilderment and resolve: Memory Eternal.

“Go then. There are other worlds
than these.” — Stephen King