With The Door Open

There is something grounding about taking a breath of fresh air. Something naturally cathartic. I work mostly sixteen hour days in one of three cramped rooms - the office where I am an intern, the computer lab where I do all of my digital work, and the classroom. I am becoming bleached of all my enthusiasm, as if the very essence of hunching over a computer all day and the lack of sunlight have stripped me of my skin and the bandage that was holding in my creative spirit has been breached, and like oxygen seeping out of a hull I am losing that which keeps me floating. And yet at night, when I return to my haven, my single room with three walls of light and a forest of frogs that sing me to sleep, I open the door, smell the mixture of the sea and the foothill mist and I remember how to breathe. The summer nights are cool enough that, with the door open, I can feel the stagnant air of my life dispersing as the breeze curls in around my feet and up my legs. There are fingers of life in that air trying to find the wounds and the cracks and seal them up with every exhale. As the temperature drops I lower my guard and let the flickering shadow of moth wings distract me from the mountain of pressure I have built up above me, shuddering under its own weight so violently that when I step outside of it I wonder who could possibly survive under such conditions.

There are little reminders every day of something good, but they are harder and harder to hold on to. A letter from a mentor who has become a colleague, a private joke with a new friend, truly grasping an alien concept. Little glimmers of hope that there might be a path still, somewhere in the dark and shaded landscape of the future. Illuminating that path is getting harder and harder as raw and naive enthusiasm is sculpted into the increasingly humble and experienced pragmatic. A creative existence has more dark times than bright, more doubt and fear than rejoicing. But those moments that shine are the only thing that we have to hold onto. It is hope and belief, not only in yourself, but in the world, and it is getting harder and harder to find. Being the best means nothing. This is not a world where anything can be defined in such terms. There is no caliper, no multiple choice, no guarantees. Committing more time, money, and effort offers you no promises. This future is imperfect, unreliable, and for every moment, every success, it was my blood on the page, my weeping the soundtrack.

Beyond the open door is only black. But when I am here, when I can sit and be, that is when I remember how to breathe. And from breathing comes a pulse. And from the pulse a stride. And from the stride a direction. And then there is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and I find my way to breathe and place one foot in front of the next, tackle one problem out of the pile, complete one task for my future. And I can't look at what I am not, and I can't judge what I haven't tried, and I won't stop picking up my feet no matter how heavy the mountain, no matter how painful the load. That is all I can do. That is all there is. Just breathe. One more breath. And then another.