i'm scared of being a nothing. of doing nothing with my life. of withering into a shell of a person that goes through the motions of life but never lives it as it should be. it's the worst at night, when i try to sleep and all of those thoughts fill my head. absolute fear. feelings of uncertainty, of impending doom (is this the end? i should just end it now), of a life forgotten, of feeling trapped within a world i helped create and now i cannot escape from. i am living within the shackles of a life that society and my family wanted for me - one of desk jobs and mortgages and happily ever after. but i am not that person! i am a creative vagabond, begging for art and life to fill me instead of money and greed and stale circumstance. i cannot go on like this. it will be the death of me.
so i walked to top of the ravine again today and found a quiet spot that looks over everything. i sat there and listened to nothing. it was beautiful, and i was filled with so much sadness and pain. i listened to the leaves rustle in the wind, the calls of birds back and forth, the pitter-patter of squirrels running through the woods, the slow trickle of the stream holding steady below. i sat there and envisioned myself falling down the rock formations and into the stream below. i imagined the rocks cutting my body to pieces, if only just to feel something (i am sick and tired of feeling nothing!). if you can control the pain, then you can control it all. i imagined feeling the warmth of blood rushing by, and then calm... giving yourself over to peaceful oblivion. all the pain gone.
and there, in my darkest of dark moments, a dog walk out of the bushes, and the tiniest purple flower rustled in the wind and beckoned for my attention. i picked up the tufts of little purples and examined them for awhile. leaves are falling everywhere, and life is trying to hold on through the weather as the seasons change from fall to winter. and these purple flowers will soon die off and fall to the ground as a gray messy ash to be blown away in the wind. and if i never picked them, would anyone have known they existed? would it have bloomed and died in that spot, never have been noticed for what it is?
beauty and natural wonder of this world sustain me for now, but it is not enough to keep me going. my art is all that's keeping me going for now - sadly, not friends, not family, but the unfinished work that i know i have yet to do. but i need to know it is going to be okay... that it's not going to be forgotten like that purple flower blowing in the wind. that it will all be for nothing.