Me, Too

To create is to ache. The marriage of being happy and being creative is rickety, built on lies. Fleeting.

Artists know. We know the broken heart is what makes the art.

We say, me too. I feel it too.

We need to feel and hurt and rage and then soothe the beast, give to the muse, bleed and vomit and sob on a page or a canvas or a hunk of clay and then.

The equivalent of a deep sigh happens in our souls.

We're cleansed and empty.

We're so so empty.

It is human nature to want to be happy. We crave comfort, we want rules and routine, we thrive in the light.

But it is artists' nature to want the darkness. We understand what lives there, in the meat which reeks of iron and salt. We understand the dirt under the fingernails, from clawing our way out.

We put it down for you, for others, so they might look at it and say, me too.

It is far easier to say me too in the darkness than it is in the light.

To say me too in the light is to admit happiness. And much else. Is fleeting.

It is the bravest thing on earth to let that iron and salt, that bile and blood, bubble into the word. Hunks of soul and pounds of flesh before the world to interpret, judge, sneer at. Or.

Or possibly.

Say, me too.