Saturday Morning Art
Early mornings. Sleepless nights. I’m still here. We’re all still here. I hate how most times things don’t make sense or come together until the end of a story. Clarity never meets you until you reach the forest’s glade. We can never see how beautifully stars align until it’s dark out.
We can’t skip chapters; and even if we do, we’ll likely miss out on a part of the story that makes it arrant.
I don’t want people to fall in love with the end of my story. I want them to fall in love with the in-between. The rough areas. The moments that reflected them and their most formless feelings.
I love carving out emotions and experiences that people know, distinctly, they just need someone to visit them with. Someone to help them unite words and emotions. I want them to see themselves in my story. You’re here with me.
We begin stories, TV-show series, books and movies with the end already in mind, or at least the ways in which we imagine things could play out. We pick up on clues, relationships and interactions that all hint at some pivotal, yet soft elements of a tale. “She’s gonna die.” “They will fall in love by the end.” “That’s his brother!”
Even if we did skip a few chapters or episodes, or read ahead to the end, the feeling of accomplishment usually won’t find us when asked “did you finish?” Imagine if chapters of a book were scattered and organized at random.
Imagine if the climax lied at the beginning of a story and the intro waited at the end. In life, we can’t keep reading our favorite chapters.
Sometimes, just keep reading. Even through the boring parts. The long sections. The immaterial. Don’t check to see how many pages until the next chapter. Allow every sentence to strum your emotions. God knows the end. He wrote the book and needs no editor or illustrator.
The chapters we wish to skip sometimes are the most pivotal ones. The details are the smallest nails and pieces needed to hold some of the sturdiest furniture together.
At a point, like Issa Rae said, solemnly, I wished I was able to fast forward to the part where everything was okay. I wanted to skip the long sections. The interludes and songs I didn’t like. The in-between things & prolonged paragraphs. But these help make my story worth telling.
At times I thought this all was probably God making up for lost times. Probably just a revisiting of all the violence I avoided as a child. The violence I avoided when staying away from the wrong streets and people. The violence I avoided when I was never jumped or pressed by strangers when walking to and from school or football practice.
Maybe this was just all of the hearts I’ve broken returning to mine. The clarity that I stole from others, escaping my hands as well. Maybe this was all of those things.
A tale usually doesn’t make sense until it’s over.
Strangely, we care or think about how something will end before we even start. There are many variations of a story. A Love story, a life story or whatever story you’re telling. The one you wish to live in as your reality is up to you. Besides, in the real world, stories never really end.
Storyteller: Kwon
