Member-only story
Art is the Reason
I wouldn’t be alive without it.
My mom always told me I was alive for a reason. I was born into this world with a holy purpose, one I was meant to find.
There were so many points at which I almost didn’t make it into the world — several health scares during my mother’s pregnancy, a stopped heartbeat during labor, a broken collarbone when I was born, another scare with a rare genetic disorder as an infant — that she tells me, I’m meant to be here. There must be purpose behind my survival, when in so many moments I almost didn’t come to be.
She used to tell me this when I was small, during car rides home from aftercare or my father’s house. I’d watch the scenery go by, green blurs of hurricane-scarred trees and the repetition of apartment complexes and condominiums and shopping plazas lulling me into a road trip stupor. I really believed her, in some of these moments, and I felt like I must be something like Jesus to have such a holy mission in life, to be kept alive for a specific purpose.
I had to grow out of that Messiah idea, eventually, but the idea of the purpose, the holy reason, remains. The answer to this riddle has always been here, staring me in the face, no matter how hard I try to deny it. The thing I come back to, over and over again, in a pattern so repeating I cannot deny its hold over my soul.
