As an artist, I’m on an alphabet soup diet, and I am starving. I chew and swallow, but the
letters get stuck on the way down, caught in a tangle of run on sentences that wraps tighter with
each question mark I dot. The lifting of a spoon to my cracked lips animates my taste buds, but it simultaneously becomes harder to speak through the growing mush of action verbs in my throat. Shriveling from a hunger ignored for so long that it is well past the point of appetite, my body accepts its fate, even welcomes it; a hunger that wrings the guts already dry of conception with my every attempt to satisfy. The reason for why I must carve impressions in the brains of others as a form of art, is it the same reason for why I nakedly hurry past the perpetually raised curtains after the warm sun sets?
I hope that one day I’ll either drink in too much inspiration on an empty stomach or I’ll
poison myself with rotten anxieties, hunching over a blank page with my head in my hands and
my thumbs jammed into my eyes reflecting blue to distract from the aching, so that I end up
vomiting a string of broken, soggy English onto the lines. I hope that the next day my portrait
will lock eyes with a stranger, and I hope they comment on my character’s stiffly painted jaw,
the metallic smell of her crimson-tinged calluses, and the way her anxious gaze follows theirs to
make sure they’re still looking.
For now, my notebook is stained with bile and writhing with the uncalculated movement
of words half formed, ideas that lack hands and feet struggling to crawl off the page. Or maybe
this heartbeat is the maggots that have made their home inside the spine, bruised and broken
from better days, giving life to the pages long since decomposed. Another young notebook acts
as the foundation for a stack of dog-eared books preaching about picking up the pen full of ink,
its pages stiff and suffocated lying beneath an optimistic headstone.
“I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest
misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. ‘Have you thought of a story?’ I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying
negative.” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein