I wrote a story once called Windows and Avenues Out. It was about how art and music can take us away from our normal everyday lives. It was a sloppy and overt piece of writing that blasted the reader with chunks of thinly veiled narrative on how tenuous and exhilarating the connection between art and audience can be and how unpredictable; how the stone reality of our existence makes leaving it by whatever means necessary a matter of survival for many of us. It was embarrassing and pretentious garbage that deserved to be expunged from this world. I abandoned it early like I do almost everything. Sometimes I think about my life like it’s a semi-realistic painting of me captured from above as though the artist were doing their work from a helicopter or a glider slowly cutting through the air. In that painting captured from above I would be a black speck somewhere in the middle of the canvas and the landscape around me would be a soft burnt yellow like the lightest shade on the skin of a summer peach and behind me would be an expanding vector of debris. A dark wedge of clutter with me as a dot at its apex. The world that I inhabit in that painting is just a featureless terrain that I am polluting with my castaway notions, lovers, toys, amulets, torn swaths of clothing, and memories. I am walking toward nothing and leaving everything behind. Wars tear apart cities in foreign countries. It’s not all Chablis and romance on the Spanish Steps. I can see a pair of eyes looking back at me across that yellow expanse, faded and almost indistinct as though a storm of sand or static was blowing between us. Those eyes that know more than me, have beheld death at close range and have felt the warm blood of a lover, sister, neighbour, turn cold in their hand in the middle of a street on a Tuesday. These are things that can never be left behind. | image via @tammamazzam