The way he sat on the chair felt heavy. Like there was much anchoring down his neck. Like there were a lifetime of concerns that made him bow his head. It was like this he crushed the cuff of his wrist and watched the floor in darkness and stillness. As if the world was leaned up against his back, but no one and nothing was in the room as accompaniment. Just shadows and a rickety chair. Shadows as dark and unresting as his hair.

These shadows whispered. "You will fail." The room was small so the reverb was loud. "Look at all the times upon which you have failed. Then and now and forever a failure. And they will hear it, and they will know it, in their bones."

A rift warbled and rippled in the air as his familiar broke through dimensions and reality to be by his side; an owl—colourless, then grey, then black as can be. Its image doubled. Then recollected itself. Its clawed feet plowed onto the man's head, like its nest was his hair, and his ear was its focus as its neck craned down, and its beak tore the atmosphere around him.

The man did not react to it entering the room, or how its weight pushed down his head, or how its open maw seemed to swallow sound itself. The shadows stopped. And the owl's voice was the only thing in his head. A wordless, soundless language between them. But he understood:

"It was time."

His finger twitched. There was a glitch as he himself made a rift in time, in space. As though he'd sat there long before and hadn't yet arrived. He stood before reality could keep up, weaving his body flawlessly through folds of time, ignoring the histories where those very flaws had shown. Like a ribbon in the wind. Moving fast; remaining slow; feeling fervent; staying solemn. He walked like he was in mourning, or perhaps performing. His heels clacked and quelled each shadow with purpose.

No longer did his gaze have a need for floorboards. Those doubts gave way to a twinkle in his eye and a spark of something great. He released his wrist and let the pain flow freely, like blood no one else could see, filling and painting a container that wasn't really there. But he willed it to be.

Another step and the room fell away, spotlights suggested a stage. He stroked the head of his owl until his familiar turned into a bow. The paint pouring from his wrist did not touch his cuff as they swished and manifested into a cello. Its spike resounding like a gong in the center of the theatre of applause.

And all doubts, fears, and flaws receded as he set out to create something timeless.

It’s all about control

the illusion of freedom

keeping you busy

optimizing your time

Do you feel satisfied?

sophisticated boredom

edited self-esteem

instantaneous contact

networked loneliness

We’ve lost who we were!

unlimited choices

less empirical knowledge

algorithmic propaganda

You’re told what to believe!

delusional actions

collective psychosis

Made easier by isolation!

psychotic breakdown

societal chaos

We’ve become unable

or perhaps unwilling

to think for ourselves

To create art of any kind is an insanity of sorts. If one really thinks about it, the search for beauty in one's creative endeavors is really a waste of time. Why? By itself, art in any of its mediums serves no significant biological or tangible practical purpose worthy of the time, energy, and pain spent in its creation. So, using the cost-benefit analysis so prevalent in good decision making, it becomes clear that the compulsion to create and the corresponding act of creating art runs contrary to a productive use of one's resources and as a result can be considered a wasteful form of madness.

Creativity can exist solely for the purpose of meeting needs. For example, it took creativity to imagine and then build the first shelter that didn't rely on a cave. It didn't need to inspire awe or illicit an emotional response. it just needed to provide shelter from the elements and protection from the cave bears, saber-toothed cats, and packs of wolves that wanted to remind prehistoric man that having an opposable thumb didn't automatically give them the top spot on the food chain. So, why did they decorate their dwellings? Was it out of boredom? Did they use decoration to let other prehistoric people know that one could have a good time if they grunted 867-5309 to Slag, that Neanderthal hussy who was happy to put out for nothing more than a greasy hunk of mammoth and a handful of berries?

No. Decorating the dwelling was done for some other reason than to communicate who was an easy club over the head and drag by the hair into the cave for a rutting. After all, we eventually developed sophisticated written and spoken languages that could concisely proclaim who had been ridden and was enthusiastically willing to be ridden more than the town camel (humped he-he)/donkey/horse etc. These written and spoken forms of communication were much more precise and didn't require the extra energy or time that the abstract thinking art elicits to understand.

So, why did Pope Julius II (who would later invent a frosty creamy, orange flavored drink enjoyed by mall customers everywhere) feel that the Sistine Chapel needed to be embellished and why was he further compelled to pay for it? After all, it would've been more practical to use the money to, oh say, feed widows and orphans, right? Then why did Michelangelo agree to risk his life lying on a rickety scaffolding sixty-eight dizzying feet above the ground to paint the ceiling of this church? Oh sure, the gig paid well, but I guarantee they didn't offer health insurance. It defies logic and supports organized religion's centuries old bad habit of ignoring those it should be helping in favor of showing off.

What about the other mediums? Well...

Literature and Poetry: Do we really need stories? After all, what is a story, but a falsehood born of a fevered imagination? The written word should be shackled in the iron bonds of the truth. More substance and less art should guide what gets written. As to poetry? Seeking a rhythm or a rhyme is simply a waste of time. Say what you mean, mean what you say.

Music: Music is too chaotic and in many cases, it can be dangerous. Being loud and making noise runs contrary to our instincts for survival. Did our prehistoric ancestors belt out, "Everyone Walk the Dinosaur" at the top of their lungs for shits and gruntles? No, it would've scared away their game and announced their presence to predators. In short, if they wanted to eat and not get eaten, silence, not drum solos was required.

Cuisine: Food is fuel. It didn't need to taste good. It just had to keep you alive while keeping parasites at the minimum.

So, why do we waste our time in the mad pursuit of beauty and self-expression? Shouldn't our energies be spent in more concrete, beneficial pursuits? Maybe. However, as a species. our existence defies what seems practical and beneficial. In fact, at our core we are agents of chaos. All that we are defies order and logic. Why have emotions? They get us in trouble and often blind us to what is easier. We are the only species on Earth that creates things in order to destroy other things. We seek to do things simply because we refuse to think that a thing is impossible. Other creatures don't complicate things and accept what is and live within what is known not in what might be possible.

In short, human beings as a species live in a constant state of defiance. To humanity, reason is often unreasonable. Logical limits get pushed or are outright ignored. Emotions send us down unknown and dangerous paths when a more calculated and emotionless perspective would be safer and more productive. Art in all its forms defies reason. Creation of art is often an act of self-destructive absurdity, that to the outside observer appears to take more than it gives. After all, the term, "Starving Artist" exists for a good reason and history is filled with artists who go unappreciated until they've passed through the digestive tracts of their worm grave mates. Still our chaotic nature demands that we nurture an equally chaotic madness that exists in color, sound, taste, and at all degrees of our imaginations. The Cheshire Cat's words continue to ring true, "We are all mad here" and we are wrapped in the madness of both our humanness and the love of and the compulsion to create art that is a symptom of that madness.

Float above

Sea of fog

Suffer in

Emotional bog

Helpless child

Full of fears

Has no hope

Shedded tears

Always thought

It’d never end

Broken spirit

Unable to mend

Persona non grata

Called a liar

Labeled weak

Psychic misfire

Trust no one

Wasted breath

Stuck performing

This living death

Anger consumes

Pent up hatred

Start to realize

Nothing is sacred

Mental scars

Never healed

Time passes

Pain concealed

Growing old

Full of anxiety

Try to fit

Within society

Is it just part of the human condition to begin resenting the rules and conformity posed with maintaining the "9 to 5"?

I need freedom, creativity and flexibility to breathe.

Is anyone else suffocating the way I am? Do you feel the urge to bolt? To live a different story here on this planet? To be free to live a life of your choosing - to be granted leniance and patience...

People keep reminding me that life is too short to not do what makes you happy - how do we get to that now, before we die? I refuse to wait until I’m too exhausted to enjoy my life to start living the way my soul yearns to exist.

It’s never been so important as it is now for me to understand how to coexist within my own two realities. Do I leap and make such a drastic change that might irrevocably affect the remaining quality of life that remains for me, here? Do I stay put and endure the rat race just to keep my lights and electric on?

At what point do we stop listening to our exhausted souls’ needs and bite our earth bound fate? It’s not too late for me, I choose to alter my course - I choose freedom.

Some nights, in the quiet moments before sleep, he could feel it pressing down on him—an invisible weight, vast and nameless, a thing without form. It wasn’t the weight of worry, nor the heaviness of a burden carried from the day; it was something far more insidious. It was the weight of existence itself, a suffocating truth that had no clear edges, no escape, and no release. The world around him would grow thick, the air itself seeming to thicken, pushing against him from every angle, as if the very space he occupied had become too narrow to breathe in. Even the act of inhaling felt slower, more laborious, as though the gap between breaths was lengthening, dragging him into an inescapable eternity.

It was not a monster, lurking in the shadows of his mind, nor a ghost whispering his name from across the threshold of his thoughts. It was something subtler, something that did not require the presence of a form, but one that filled the silence between moments, creeping into the cracks of his awareness. This presence was not malevolent in a traditional sense. It had no fangs, no claws, no twisted face to strike fear into him. No, it was a quiet thing, a still thing. Yet it was the most terrifying thing he could imagine, because it wasn’t a thing at all. It was an absence, a lack of meaning, a truth that pressed down from all sides, reminding him that there was no exit from his own existence. Not tonight. Not ever.

Death, he realized, would never come. Not now. Not in the future. Not ever. It wasn’t that he feared death—it was that he realized it was no longer a possibility. He was caught in something worse: an endless existence, unmarked by beginnings or endings, untroubled by the merciful release of finality. Death had been promised to the living, to those who fought, who loved, who burned with desire. But what of those who refused to participate? What of the ones who drifted through life like a whisper, unnoticed, unimportant? For them, there was no peace. There was only an ever-tightening grip of time, an eternal stretch of moments that bound him tighter with each passing second.

The ache wasn’t in the promise of death; it was in the absence of it. It was a deeper kind of suffering—a slow, creeping suffocation of the soul. The world had no place for those who did not live fully, those who did not carve out a name for themselves in the chaos of existence. The truth began to settle over him like dust, invisible but everywhere, as pervasive and unyielding as the passage of time. He wasn’t alive. He wasn’t dead. He was something worse, something that didn’t even have the dignity of ending.

A loophole in the cosmic order. A thing too insignificant for erasure. Too unimportant to even be remembered. He had become a man left behind—not forgotten, exactly, but abandoned by the very force that should have taken him, leaving him to rot in the in-between, a lingering shadow of something once human.

But if he wasn’t dead, what was he? The question lingered, unanswered, as he tried to grasp at the thought. The gods couldn’t have simply left him, could they?

He thought of the old alchemists, hunched over their dusty tomes, their hands stained with ink and mercury, searching for the secret to eternal life. They spoke of potions, of blood sacrifices, of dark rituals performed under the pale light of a crescent moon. Perhaps they were wrong, he mused. What if the answer was simpler than they had ever imagined? What if the key to immortality wasn’t the drinking of poison or the sacrificing of lambs? What if the secret lay not in action, but in the passive refusal to live? The rejection of the world’s demands. The denial of participation. No blood, no bargains—just a quiet rot, a failure to live. That, he realized, might be the true curse. A life without death, but not because of some divine mercy. No, because the gods themselves had simply overlooked him.

The elders whispered about him in the dark corners of ancient temples, their voices low, thick with caution. They called him the Forgotten One, a name spoken with the same reverence one would reserve for a curse. He was not a ghost—not in the way the tragic and the lost were. He didn’t belong to the realm of the sorrowful, nor the doomed. No, he was something else, something far worse. He was a shadow in the shape of a man, lingering at the edges of existence, a footnote in the great narrative of life and death, a thing that was neither. They said he had once been a man, flesh and blood like any other. But he had moved through the world like a whisper, unseen, unheard. His footsteps left no mark, his words passed unnoticed. He did not fight, nor love, nor hate. He had neither ambition nor despair. He simply existed, a passive participant in a world that demanded more than mere existence.

And when the Reaper came to collect the souls of the dead, it had missed him. He had been overlooked. Forgotten. Left behind in the cosmic shuffle of things.

So now he lingered.

The world had its laws, its silent, cruel laws. Live fully, love deeply, hurt deeply, rage against the tides, and you will earn your exit. But what of those who did none of those things? What of those who slipped through life unnoticed, who never burned with desire, who never sought to leave a mark on the world? Those who never lived, never fought, never loved, never hated—what of them?

They were not granted the mercy of endings.

The truth continued to weigh on him, pressing down like the slow accumulation of dust. He wasn’t alive, he wasn’t dead. He was simply forgotten—too unimportant to be remembered, too insignificant to be erased. A man caught in the space between, a soul left to rot without ever having had the chance to live. It was a terrible kind of purgatory—one without even the faintest hope of redemption.

And so, he waited. He waited in that vast, empty place where all the forgotten things rotted away. He waited in the space where the gods themselves did not dare to look, where even the force of existence itself dared not venture.

He waited in silence, with nothing but time stretching endlessly before him.

We listened raptly as the Captain spoke, madly waving his arms, speaking of the riches awaiting us on the shores beyond the horizon.

New to the ways of the sea, none worried that the ship had no one at the wheel as all were making sure the Captain saw them listening and nodding, all hoping to curry favor and reap the greatest rewards.

We didn't know the Captain had won the boat in a backroom poker game and knew less than any of us about how to sail the ship, having given the boot and the finger to the former captain's crew.

"Bunch of morons," he was heard to say about them.

Miles from land, the boat began to spin. The Captain stopped waving his arms and speaking long enough to wonder aloud, "Who's driving this thing?"

Looking up to the helm, we saw only dancing shadows, and some of us were gripped by fear, its tiny talons having silently yet swiftly snaked within us, relentlessly squeezing, stabbing our hearts and minds as we realized the future he had promised was as solid as the smoke receding before our eyes.

It snaked tighter when he shifted, sliding through the spaces he left open, winding between his ribs, curling where breath should have been. It moved like warmth at first, like something meant to hold him, coil after coil, snug and steady, a presence so familiar he mistook it for comfort.

But love, like this, tightens when you move wrong. When you reach for air.

It didn't strike. No fangs, no venom. Just the slow, patient squeeze. A constriction mistaken for embrace. A grip that convinced him he was safe, even as it stole the air from his lungs.

He let it happen. Thought it was supposed to feel this way. Thought love should press in, reshape him, make him smaller, make him fit inside the space it allowed. But when he tried to breathe deep, to stretch, to move beyond what it had decided he could be—

That was when it reminded him:

It had never been his to hold.

My sister came up to me last night.

She was crying.

She didn’t want her Dad to see.

She was scared he would get upset,

so she came to me.

She came to me,

her sibling,

to do the job of a parent

and I did that job.

I helped her calm down.

I helped her organize her thoughts.

I did everything I could.

But I still have to wake up,

knowing my sister will never have all she needs.

I don’t want

what happened to me,

to happen to her.

So I work,

I keep going,

for her.

I finish what I have to do,

Then, I ask her if she’s ok.

I ask her what happened at school today.

I ask her about her mom.

I ask if her mom was in a good mood today.

I ask if her mom gave her dinner.

I ask what my sister had to hide in order to survive.

I ask all this

because no one asked me.

No one asked me if I was ok,

they just assumed.

No one told me parents weren’t supposed to blame you for the grocery bill.

No one told me parents were supposed to love you more than they loved themselves.

No one told me I was supposed to be allowed to leave the house,

I was supposed to be allowed to go to school,

I was supposed to be a kid,

I was supposed to have been ok,

been taken care of.

Instead,

I assumed that the best the world had to offer was a cold room,

a blanket on the floor

and a child who got yelled at for wondering why nothing ever changed.

I don’t want that to happen to my sister.

Now it is.

I can do nothing to stop it.

All I can do is hope,

give her a person to talk to,

make sure she knows she’s loved

then watch.

Watch

as she is taken away by the same person who ruined my life.

All I can do is watch,

as she comes home hungry,

gets to school late and lies

Because no one believes you when you tell them it was your parent that made you late,

it was your parent

that didn’t get you dinner,

it was your parent

who made you sleep in their bed,

it was your parent

who tried to stop you from going to school,

it was your parent

who told you you would be safe in their clutches.

It was your parent,

who decided you were too broken to be saved.

And it was every other adult you told

who made it impossible to escape.

This was my life

but I’ve never said a word,

Why?

I’m sure you can guess.

So guess.

Think of everything that could have gone wrong and ask if you could do the same.

Could you last the pressure?

I could, but it almost broke me.

I don’t want that to happen to her

but it is.

There's nothing I can do to stop it.

And the worst part?

The worst part is when my sister, the kid I raised,

Calls me mom

And I have to tell her she’s wrong

I have to tell her I’m not her parent

I never will be

Instead,

it's the adults

who are watching a movie

Taking a nap,

Ignoring the world

While I sit here, and watch my sister cry

Cry, not because of what happened at school

But because of the response her parents have

They didn’t notice she arrived

They didn’t notice she was crying

And worst of all

If she tells them

It will only get worse

So she comes to me

My sister,

Comes to me,

her sibling,

to do the job of a parent

and I do that job.

I will continue to do that job for as long as I live

Because no one did it for me.

I once heard the battering of drums, the rhythm of a dozen battered, broken, aimless versions of myself stomping along. Uniform blackness. Had taken those like me to my bed, hard, and harder, cruel and cruller. Far too bright, too hot, too blinding in their own sickness that it spun me into a web of far-too-loud bleating, beatings.

But I hear strings now. They spur flowers from the darkest parts of me, like splintering flesh around broken bone. I feel nothing but safe. Constantly cool for a head too hot as my own, in the light of her moon.