You tell yourself that it is just one more lonely night. The end of one more day and all you’ve had to eat was your self and this same tired prayer. Please, Art, save me now. From the darkness and from myself to you. Tell me one more time why it is all worth it. You. Don’t get confused or you will fail. But for how much longer can you stave off confusion when you find yourself driving madly at it every day and the road is and always was so hard and all you can tell yourself is that you did this to yourself. You wanted this. All because you thought that if you prayed hard enough to this idea you once had that came to you in the light of a beautiful universe you would be rewarded for your dedication and you promised that you’d do everything you could to be an artist some day. Well now you have what you’d always asked for. Your voice. But this voice doesn’t make it any better. It is an outlet through which you can report only that it will continue to be a hard road because it doesn’t come easy.
Your hands shake in the coming cold of winter and you realized that you bet everything on them and this action you’ve trained them to do. This life of art. But you can’t lose your faith. Not in the future. To stumble for one day could seal ones fate. So every day you wake up and you devote these hands and hope that it keeps happening. You will do this every day. Please keep working.
But its not enough to pray. One must challenge weakness like a warrior. With absolute sternness. You have trained every day. You’ve learned to set up shop, do the work you’ve set for yourself, pack it all up and move on again. You thrive on this. There is no turning back. But all these lonely nights do come to gnaw on you. And the worst part is you know that you must go through them alone. There is no sharing this place. Or at least you think so.
What if everything you thought proved false? What then? That would be convenient. It’s probably much more likely that some of the thoughts are wrong, some are true, and with most it doesn’t matter.
You’re a drifter set to the task of leaving beautiful things behind you and that is what you do best. That is the best way there is for you to share you. Because you are an artist and artists have to open up a whole lot of dark to open up one ray of light, one fragile little dream of beauty, and then they have to bring that little thing back into the real world. And oh the problems with the real world.
This real world which would have the artist turning cogs forever, thinking themselves to death in the endless tedium of some job. To make instead of music commodities. This real world that thinks only of how to sell it.
So you have to sell it. Or give it up. But giving it up just isn’t an option. Not now. You tattooed that on your neck. No going back now. Not nohow.
Always been a sucker for rash decisions.
So you’re leaving town again. And again and again and again. Always building towards nothing, constantly deconstructing everything just to have more pieces to play with. Living on the run from the one thing you know you have no power over, that thing you fear the most. The thing that you know the best. You.
The places you’ve been and lives that you’ve influenced for better or for worst. All the people that say they care about you and for all you know they really do. Waiting. For you to figure out what it is that you do. Maybe you’ve figured out what you do to make money and maybe that was the thing they were most anxiously waiting for. But you’re waiting for something more. For that step just past pure when you can finally relax because you did it. You got what you were praying for.
Thats what its all about, right? That’s what all the sacrifices were for even though your friends don’t think they’re sacrifices. From the outside it seems like a life of luxury. And you beg them to understand the beast that chases you so they will forgive you while you pardon yourself once again from another friend or lover. A wall you can’t drop always building up to stop them from getting in to protect them from what it is you know. Because if they knew where the wall came from they’d all build walls too. Don’t give them the wall disease.
You see clearly where all this is headed. You know you’re always going to be alone, drowning in a sea of affection for having done things that you have lost touch with. Every day make one more fracture between the you you were and the you that you are.
And now you’re writing letters to yourself on the internet. But that’s what it has always been, hasn’t it?
The Paper Trail 