Sopranos and tenors always make my soul soar. Right now, the owner of the incredible voice that I’m listening to is Katherine Jenkins. There’s magic in the melody, but there’s something even transcendental when one understand the lyrics.
French, Italian, Spanish, and even English, transmit a perception of life that can’t be understood through any other language. That’s one of the reasons I learned to speak English (Spanish is my first language), then Italian, French, and now German. Every word has a flavor, a meaning, a whole universe condensed in the few centimeters where is written, or in the few seconds when it’s spoken, or sung.
Last year, after a horrible crisis with my ex (when he broke up with me, and gave me the bonus of telling me that he loathed me) I stopped writing. Everything that I used to write was positive, and at that moment, my world went deep dark. After three months, I started a text affair with an artist and philosopher who had a profound love for aesthetics, literature, music and words (he also used to be a drummer and a song writer). We started flirting in a thread game of a forum we both belonged to. In the game we had to create three words sentences, where each word had to start with the last three letters of the previous sentence. After playing in the open thread, we began doing it in a private conversation, and what came out was poetry and passion. We invented other games, and the exchange became so intense, that I once had an orgasm remembering his words while driving.
The words we created were so powerful that we had sex, each in their shore of the big ocean that separated us, each behind their screen, writing madly, and getting excited beyond control at the same time. It felt as if we had actually made love to each other, as if we were actually in the same room. We were creating beauty through words, we soared and flew. It was one of the most amazing times of my life. I fell crazily in love with him (I’m a sapiosexual).
We wrote more than 250 pages together in a month. He asked me once if I was ever going to write about him, “the English man who kept falling apart for no apparent reason”. I told him that I would, but I actually haven’t done it up until today (that was six months ago). I still miss his mind, his spirit. When I look back, I think he was in a manic episode when we had our creative text affair (I suspect he was bipolar) and so was I (I suspect I have ADHD, and people with that condition also have manic episodes, but with far less intensity; we are both aspies too). He couldn’t sleep well during that time, and neither could I. I was in a constant state of bliss during the first two weeks, but the next week he fell in a depressive, awful mood, which felt like torture. Then followed another manic week of love and poetry writing together.
After a month in the relationship, saying that he couldn’t continue living like that, and that he had to go back to his drawing (he said he used to draw for sixteen hours straight), he cancelled his email account, just after sending a message saying “I’m sorry”. He vanished in the same way he came.
We didn’t just create hot, sexy poetry, we also chatted a lot, sent each other photos and songs, and deliberated about life, art, philosophy, literature, music and culture in general. I talked about my life living in several countries, he talked about his beloved sea. We shared our creative work, his drawings, my writings and our lives’ stories. He said he was learning a lot from me, but he also ended up acting like a mentor. He enhanced my poems, gave me recommendations on creative work, and made me trust myself. I knew he had read most of the hard philosophy books (he graduated in philosophy from the University of Leeds, where J.R.R. Tolkien used to teach) and also had read those mountains of literature that are The Lord of the Rings books, not once, but five times. His opinion weighted heavy in my self-esteem.
He told me I had a lot of insight, that I made him think and that I could write “about the pavement in the street and still make it interesting”. He also said that I wrote in English like a native speaker, and I believed him. “Write something beautiful today”, was a phrase that he texted once, and it later became this blog’s motto.
Out of all the contributions that he made to my life, his greatest gift was to make me understand that being creative was not an option for me. Just as drawing was essential for his existence, writing was essential for mine.
It is because of him that I started this blog, under a pseudonym. I still remember what he said, after me telling him that I was going to follow his advice and start a new, secret blog the following Monday: “Don’t you feel a quiet excitement, because you know that you will write again?” Yes! I did! How did he know? For the first time in my life I had found someone that understood how it felt to be in contact with one’s spirit, someone who understood how important it was to create.
Creating is to swim down into my soul to depths that I didn’t know existed, in order to grab a treasure and bring it up to surface. The life of a creative person, of an artist, whether it’s a word artist like me, a plastic artist like him, or any other kind of artist, is the incessant look for beauty, a beauty so intense that can have the ability of waking up other people’s soul, but most importantly, that has the ability to wake up our own souls.
Not looking for beauty, for us, creative people, means living half a life, since anything else feels like dying. When we realize who we are and what we do, there is no choice, but to create. Any other option means to allow our spirit to slowly walk a path towards auto destruction.
I want to live. I will forever thank him for bringing my soul back to life.
Here I am, writing, alive, again.
