My favourite Stephen King quote is, “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings—words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”

Something happens when people grow with age, making loneliness simpler and more common. So, I start running without an end in sight, trying not to be bogged down by the fast pace of life. To escape, I take my palette, ink, and paper with me.

First comes art. Art has taught me to observe, pay attention to the world around me, embrace things, people, and emotions when they are here, and let them go when their time has come.

Then there’s poetry, which has taught me to hold onto those emotions a little longer.

I get out a sheet of canvas and some bristle brushes. I’m either analysing the personalities of leads in a ‘Fleabag’ scene and writing about them or spending hours painting the most heartbreaking scene in the series.

I blend primary colours for my retina fix to the narrative. I sometimes smudge soft charcoal on a piece of cartilage paper to bring life back into me. I once spent sixteen hours painting after failing my first chemistry test.

Once I get past the ego of creating art, there is rarely a clear monetary reward.

The money is frequently scarce, and recognition is never there. To undertake this type of job, you must simultaneously embrace and betray your humanity. I believe I began staining the worn sheets and canvases with the naive belief that it would make it out of my room, but the work is too difficult for that to happen.

The paradox of art is that it kills me a bit, but the more I make, the more alive I feel. The smudged charcoal layer stares into my soul. Like waking up and falling deeper into a dream at the same time.

I have accepted that the real reward of creating is just creating, even when nothing happens afterwards. At first glance, it might appear to be an absurd choice.

When I complete my piece and it’s beautiful and sellable, it’s the cherry on top.

I have started so many pieces but completed painting only a few ones. It almost feels like I haven't done enough to advocate for it.

Even as I'm trying to run from everything beyond my psyche, I can’t shake the feeling that I'm nothing in the artist lounge and everything in a room full of college students.

Then I feel this tremendous guilt that I’m not painting or writing enough to justify my humour. I realise that dreaming of nice days to happen is, in its own way, a nice part.

That being said, I firmly believe that growing older and sadder is a call to embrace life to the fullest, with all of its baggage.

So I smudge the art and swirl my fingertips around the eyes to make it flawed, allowing the viewer to perceive their baggage through the abstract.

The "grass is greener on the other side" paradox in the hellish place between the end of something and the beginning of nothing always gets the better of us. When you leave something behind, there's always the idea that you left a better fate behind. The trouble is, when you stay, you wonder the same thing. So I run. The next moment, I'm booking a flight to my college for an engineering degree.

Then I find myself at another stop on my escape route, where I believe all that’s wrong with my life and relationships will resolve once I do this one thing I’ve been working on.

I feel torn apart and sewn back together, needle by needle. After this one article, one manuscript, and one painting, it’s all going to be okay.

After drawing one more sphere on my physics numericals, the dreadful class will end, and I'll be home in no time.

However, after finishing that one piece, for some reason, nothing changed, and I'm back to where I was to discover that it was an ongoing performance that began before I bought a canvas.

Then I get to the outdoor part of my escapism. I run so far that I find myself melding in with everything I see. I see honey petals and wings from the butterfly tattoo I have on my chest.

I see the setting sun in the same pastel colours that I use to paint my landscapes. The mahogany timber tree branches mimic the texture of my hair.

It’s almost as if my ears were designed to hear the howling wind in sync with my pounding heart.

I forget what I missed out on, but I still fear missing things. People say don't look down while walking, or you will miss the view around you. But sometimes, I think it's exactly where I need to look rather than looking for places I’m yet to reach or maybe even can't reach.

Sometimes, I think we need to take full sight of the place where we stand and appreciate that it's still firm ground, maybe green and possibly flowery.

Then I conclude. Because I can’t answer major questions about the world, life, or myself, listening to exquisite things and penning them down could be the closest I'll ever get.

I eventually return to the world after jumping into thin air, hoping to vanish. I feel my heart sink as I approach terminal velocity, and once my velocity surpasses the acceleration due to gravity, I sew my beating heart back into my chest.

This gives me the strength to revolt against the absurdity of life.