“The life of man upon earth is a warfare” — Job 7:1
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. I do not know where to start. Lost? Broken? Empty? What words would you use to describe a feeling without enough fuel? I don’t know, but what I do know is I have drifted from my true form. I allowed others, past lovers, friends, real and fake, to pull me from myself. No one is to blame, just me.
That is an important point, don’t forget it: you are running this game. You don’t get your freedom until you take it with fangs bared.
Music has been the force, along with God, that has kept me together. It has allowed me to take pieces of myself, pain and pleasure, and put them into something beautiful. Thankfully I have found an audience that has felt these songs, but somewhere along the way I stopped moving.
What causes something, or someone, to stop moving? To move, you must have fuel. And I was running on the wrong fuel. Cheap, empty fuel.
See, maybe some part of me thought that by writing the right song for her, I’d get her back. Maybe some part of me thought that writing words to the right beat, rapping them with the right cadence, could summon what no one in all of time has ever summoned: the past.
To get the dead back, you have to run on death’s fuel.
What is death’s fuel? Regret. Sorrow. Self-Pity.
I ran on these for a while, that Monte Carlo took the fuel I put into it. With death’s fuel I was welcome in certain neigborhoods. Those decaying welcomed me with open, rotting arms. The self-absorbed fools staring at themselves in dirty mirrors were always down to talk, but only with words of destruction. What am I doing here? Surely I am not damned to such a place. What troubled me is all the familiar faces I saw when I was there. People that had given up. People that had so much, yet burnt it all as a sacrifice to what they’d lost. People I cared for. What scared me most was I was doing the same.
Comfort can kill you, and I was dying.
See, it was my monsters who saved me. They reminded me who I really am, who I am designed to be. God did not design me to get lost, he designed me to win.
I shifted into 2nd gear, popped the clutch into 3rd, then 4th, speed gaining now. I could hear them, the lost, calling for me, crying for me to stay. “Keep going” my monsters would say, God would say. Some of the lost would almost catch up, grab on, bodies ripping in two from the speed. My foot goes to the clutch, 5th gear, 90 mph. They can’t handle that, but I can.
I turn the dial, my music louder now, the sun is rising, monsters smiling. I have tasted the dark, I have walked the pits of despair. God is my fuel, truth is my fuel. What songs will I make now? I still have a story to tell, a legend to write. Whatever they may be, I hope they bring you closer to the freedom I am just now starting to taste.
And one more thing:
it is not my fangs that got me there in the pits of hell,
it was my fangs that got me out.
Prince Aki