Art for Art’s Sake

You’ve barricaded yourself in this dim groundfloor unit, your broken swivel chair groaning under you like an old man, a bright white screen gaping up at you, the cursor blinking. Your gleaming altar. The Computer God. Hunched forward at eighty-five degrees. You feel a knot in your back, your legs cramp. You stretch them under your desk.

You have been here all day, gone into it, lost in yourself, departed from the world and fighting against the clock.

Isn’t there something else you could’ve gambled your life on?

You think about all the hours you’ve spent bent-backed in the infertile orchid of literature, sewing, reaping, your dreams bound up in the harvest, only to watch it fail year after year, only to start all over like a scorned lover who can’t take no for an answer.

You think of all you’ve given up for that elusive chimera, how you bankrupted yourself, how you pared your possessions down to a backpack, how you left everyone behind to follow the blackbirds and the notes of some beautiful ancient instrument.

Only to find yourself years later living under altered circumstances and diminished odds, surrounded by different faces on another continent, working the same old crops – sewing, reaping, harvesting – still failing regularly, and yet wholly incapable of falling out of love.