Scrolling through some old blog posts here I came across this one, did some double checking and…yeah…it’s just four months after this other one. It just really crashed everything I was up to creatively then. And then I spent another decade living in a wonderful dream only to crash and burn even worse.

Nat King Cole is singing on my iPod and it’s drizzling freezing rain outside and I’m nursing a glass of Kahlua and there is a face and a name that I just can’t get out of my thoughts, and it’s been like that for days now and I’m sorry. I had a couple of cartoons I wanted to get finished before today and I just haven’t been able to put pen to paper for days now. This is why I stopped drawing, stopped painting, stopped working with my cameras, for over a decade…it’s why I’m a software engineer now, and not the graphic artist or photographer everyone from Woodward assumed I’d become someday…this bundle of feeling that I have to deal with every time I walk into that space inside of me where all my creativity comes from. There’s a piece missing from what should have been my life and before I can sit down and do anything in my art room I have to deal with that and sometimes I just can’t. There’s a bit of that loss, that quiet, waiting, life-on-hold emptiness, in Everything I’ve Ever Done since 1975 and by the late 1980s I just got so sick of seeing it staring back at me from my artwork that I just stopped doing anything…I took my easel down, put my oils, my pens and charcoal sticks, my drawing pads away, put my cameras away, and just plinked on a computer (just like I’m doing now) for creative release.

I want that part of me back. I really want it back…

Yeah. But it’s not coming back.

[Update…] I moved forward a few days in the blog posts and came across this ode to Scarborough Fair…

…it’s all just ambiguous enough that you can see in it almost anything you want to.  Maybe this was medieval England’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.  Maybe its a devoted couple having a good laugh together that while they aren’t the perfect lovers of the folk tales and ballads, they’re still happily in love all the same.  Maybe its a couple who’ve let each other down, angrily hurling impossible demands at each other.  Maybe the song is about how love makes us rise above ourselves, brings things out of us that we’d never have known were there, never have known we could do or become, until we met that one person we would do anything for.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,

Perhaps once upon a time there were two people who might have loved, but time and circumstance just made it impossible.  And now all they can do is wave at each other at a distance, smile a little, laugh a little, and ironically give each other these little absurd tasks to win each other, knowing full well it can never be.

Remember me to one who lives there,
He once was a true love of mine.

What do you do when your heart is breaking? Write a song. Write some poetry. Make art that gets it out of you, before despair makes you want to go jump off a bridge.