ARTIST’S JOURNAL. |. JUNE 2023. |. DON’T ASK ME WHERE I’VE BEEN

By Emma Sparrow

I know, I know, I know, it has been a while, my imaginary friends in the cyberverse. For this, I apologize. Life has just been crazyyyyyy in all the bad ways but in, like, a distant way, you know? Life is kind of like being strapped to the back of a race car heading straight for train with 1,000 foot drops on both sides, and if I focus on any of that for too long, I go a little bit crazy, you see. I feel like I’ve been split into multiple personalities almost some of the time. I’m one person in my mind and another person with my voice and still another to my spirit. Is this what it means to have a psyche burst? To hate your universe so much you create a new one to become trapped in? When I’m here, things feel fine. I can breathe a bit. But when I’m there? It’s all I can do to color in the lines, and that’s all I do. I sit and I color and I think about the things that bring me joy because every single time I check in on reality, it is despair.

When I’m there, my name is Sam now. Not Emma or any other name you might have once known me by existing just as a turtle in its shell, but Sam. Sam is a dude because I really didn’t want to be a woman anymore, what with all those attacks on women’s rights. F that. I guess that makes me trans now? Though Emma is technically a bird so… my pronouns are definitely officially They. Don’t kill me because of it. It’s just how my spirit is coping with the splitting of realities, I think. Has there ever been a time period like this before in the history of mankind when reality was begging on its knees to please just acknowledge its existence? In Philosophy, there is always the question of “what am I?” and “who is we?” and “what is reality?” but I remember the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, when the world basically pretty much felt like it was the same to everyone. I remember believing we all lived in the same reality and not really having much evidence to the contrary. We all had cable and we all got the same newspaper and we all just… talked like human beings.

I’m mostly trying to kid around right now, but my head is just pounding.