art is dead and i guess i’m the poor fuck who has to give the obituary; as if art and i had a loving relationship for the past 10 years instead of being the whirlwind of chaos that all my relationships inevitably are; i’m going to do my best to mourn art because there will be people at the funeral and there will be eyes waiting for mine for tear up ( - not to say that i imagine it, attending the funeral of that which has tortured me most, and wondering if i will tear up and wondering if i will ever forgive myself if i tear up)
but. mourning. right. morning. like the mornings of waking up with my copy of Pinocchio still under my pillow and my mother’s old cellphone haphazardly thrown aside, flashlight still on. morning, like another morning of walking past my still-open palette and pathetically empty sketchbooks. morning, because you’re supposed to tidy up in the mornings to give yourself a healthy start but who could possibly tidy up during a mourning of all that is not accomplished. morning like half-asleep daydreams of a life either better or worse, but a bit more vivid than right now.
mourning art is a bit like mourning yourself, really. not that metaphors and i have ever gotten along, like a cousin twice removed at the funeral that i have imagined for 6 years. i’m 18 and that’s a healthy age to mourn yourself, i imagine, because i’m far away enough from my younger self that i can watch her ghost without feeling my own hands fade too. art is dead and she’s joined it with her oil pastels and cheap watercolors because the minute capitalism tells me my art is nothing without spending i have already driven a knife into my own chest.
R.I.P to loving your own work so fiercely that everyone else has to be wrong, they have to be. R.I.P to having a concrete picture of the future that you label college because that’s the dream, and now the dream is here and I’m caught just a little off-guard, and no one told me exactly what job I should get to be happy, but they’re telling me a lot of numbers but numbers don’t translate well into daydreams that don’t translate well into something to work for. R.I.P to laziness, not because it’s gone but because it’s overstaying its welcome by a couple lifetimes, so it might as well be at peace while I try to escape its grasp. R.I.P to a guiltless night’s sleep or to a guilty waking day or to whatever it felt like to wake up after a dream that terrified you into working rather than diving deeper into muffled melodies that help you mourn in your mornings.
art is dead and dreams are close to follow.
By Sarosh Kayani.
