I think artists often soak in sadness, drown in the endless despair. Soap-suds of sorrow dripping down their frail, pale silhouettes. Great artists such as; Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Life-changing musicians such as; Ian Curtis, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith.
The greatest advice I’ve ever been blessed with is to make something of the pain- create something so uniquely sculpted to your plagued mind that others can barely even begin to comprehend. I lap up these words like a well-trained animal until they thud and bash at my skull.
Maybe wallow for weeks at a time; Turn the amp up until your paint peels and only remnants of cracked, shaking walls remain. Wipe away the haunting layer of dust, dream a meaningless metaphor and continue to shred the strings of a rusted guitar until they’re left with a thick coating of crimson. Dance, drink, scream to the soundtrack of your own pretentious suffering. Stand up and fall down, a warped circle of messy repetition.
Scrawl ink over fading paper, staining white to black. Words so awful and grotesque that you can taste the sharp bitterness dripping from your tongue and pooling in the gaps between your yellowing, crooked teeth. Words maybe even laced with beauty.
I write this as though I’m above all, some God in teenage girl form. All this leaves is a complete disconnection from the static which is reality. A warped viewpoint- the dull, the grey, living through suffocation.
I’ve spent far too long under the false belief that pain is the only adequate muse and that just maybe that is why the talented die so young, choking, drowning alive on some random Tuesday evening in September.
Art is much more appreciated once fate is reached and only then do we finally pick apart the tragedy carved deep within it all.
So pick the ripest orange you can find and gently peel the segments apart, truly taste the richness and try to differentiate where the hints of sour end and the sweetness begins, mixed flavours slow dancing across your taste buds, whirling through and cleansing your mind and soul.
Escape this unending cycle; write, sing, scream about life and love. Cherry- coloured lips, wine- stained, seeping rhymes of how life is worth living. Who sketches the line between wisdom and stupidity?
I never wish to meet him.
By Lilia Maffia