Memorial Day 2021, I sat across the table from my father and had a conversation that would change my life. A week earlier, 10 police officers burst in and pointed their guns at my head sitting eating breakfast at the table we now talked at, hauling me off for the third time. I could tell this whole experience was aging him, he never let on how much it hurt him to watch his son suffer this way but it showed from time to time. After proving that the ankle monitoring device that had been on me since April was being used to stalk and put my life in danger we finally got it removed before this night.
I told him I was thinking of shooting that weekend, that mentally I couldn’t go on without remembering why I was fighting. Without hesitation he told me to go and that I needed to do it for me, looking back I can’t imagine how much strength that took. Ever since then, I’ve recalled how it always comes back to the relationship of the artist and their art, the secret is always in the vulnerability, the going back time and time again, pushing your way towards something that is largely unseen; a path that unravels before you. I went that night and never looked back, taking those principles with me that what brought you through the valley will also take you up the mountain.
When I arrived here, I sat my bags down at sunset and sprinted down foreign streets, a rage inside me burning. Why did I still feel like I was in a cage? Invisible to being seemingly everywhere, broke to millions, breaking generational curses and still I felt like I was being overshadowed by something I couldn’t escape. The lightning flashed all around as I climbed the metallic spire, lightning rods on both side buzzing, charged with electricity but I didn’t care, I was hunting again, I was as alive as an artist as I’ve ever been. We live in the hunt, lost in our own world, healing ourselves as we create and healing as we project to the world, transparent in struggle of the never ending question of “Why?” I realized my healing and that I would bring to the world lied in always coming back to this place; an interminable loop of going back to the great search.
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