# A New Masthead

published: 2019-11-19

Ever so recently, everywhere given advice to not base myself on a sense of melancholy, to avoid "making sadness my aesthetic", to make it harder for one to relearn oneself and their worth outside of the borders of the Suffering Country they've unwittingly found themselves in exile from the rest of the world in.

One would be forgiven for thinking that all I ever focused on was the melancholy, that I had sacrificed myself on its altar for one last chance at appeasing the muses enough to refill the well of creative passion. And one would also be forgiven for thinking that I had failed somehow, that I had turned the muses against me forever, leaving the corpse of their once-favorite bird to rot inside the golden cage.

But, as much as I would like to be- as much as I have prepared to be as a coping mechanism- I am no nihilist. The natural world, despite staring down imminent destruction and total and complete technological takeover and the slavery to the Wired inherent, still holds on to life, still clings to a sliver of a hope that it will not only survive its current trials and tribulations but thrive through them. And despite the constant voices of my surroundings entreating me to give up, that there is nothing left and that through my indecision I have dug a breathing grave which I lie in, there still remains a part of me, tumbling into the fiery tempest, arm outstretched to the sky, yelling with the softest voice- the loudest I possibly can-

Help me, please.

And it is a storm that comes and knocks everything down, that destroys everything in its path- nearly everything, for if my dreams were to be believed, the pillar of a fridge would always survive, white or gray, poking its head over the wreckage like a monument to survival. It is a storm that singes every edge I have, severs any connections to the heavens I might have ever had, leaves me barely breathing, just barely alive at the end.

But instead of the melancholy, the worship of the destruction, I instead find the strength to lift my head and watch the sunrise after with my weary eyes. The peek of the sun over the horizon as it casts its golden glow over the wreckage, the chaotic nest of a bird newly free from the cage, the assurance that the world has not ended, that there is still more life to be had. That whatever the hell just happened, Life was still more powerful, Life still prevailed.

And that is what I always stretch my hands out for, always yearn to grasp. The sudden paradoxical feelings of fragility and strength together. A brand new world with none of the trappings of the old. And once the bird's wings heal, they'll flap once, twice, and then back into the air where the beast belongs.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander