Borrowed Keys

Why do I need someone else's art to feel myself?

Everybody writes better than I do. Everybody paints what I can only feel, photographs what dissolves the moment I try to hold it.

That’s fine.

Someone else’s chord progression opened a door I didn’t know was mine. A stranger’s brushstroke said the thing I’ve been circling for years.

That’s the problem. I’m tired of borrowing keys.

Because I have keys. I have notebooks. A camera. Acrylics. A bass. A tablet. A beautiful life.

All of it is waiting. All of it mine.

And still — at the bottom of me, there is something wordless, unnamed, but real in a way that few things are real to me.

I wish I could write about what I cannot define. I wish I could paint the weight of it, photograph the shape it makes when it moves through me at night.

But maybe that’s the only honest thing I’ve ever said:

I feel it. I just can’t carry it out.

And yet —

that thing. That unnamed, unwritten, unpainted thing.

It should be mine to say.