The frozen version

Edited by my beloved friend K.L

My friend writes poems.

… And the way I learned it was kind of unusual.

Recently, I came across an acquaintance’s personal page on social network. Her profile picture was overflowing with happiness with the sparkles of joy shining on her wedding dress. However, one detail gave me a bit of surprise: the groom was not the person I thought it would be.

It has been three years since I last saw this girl. Back then, she was in a long-term relationship with a friend of mine.

Out of curiosity, I went checking on this friend’s personal page as well. And that’s how I found out that he writes poems these days. And all his pieces are entirely about unfinished love.

The easiest way to draw a conclusion might just be to assume that these poems are for that bride-to-be whose eyes are full of happiness, but with someone else.

However, this is just my version of reality that I have built up by making a (way too simple) shortcut.

Just because the last version I know of my friend is him to be “this girl’s boyfriend” does not mean that he would be stuck there forever.

Subjectively,

… if we just look at separate details that I collected one by one throughout, say, one day, it is so easy to create a soap opera scenario: this girl left my friend and their 10-years relationship to get married with someone else. My friend could not get over it and ended up starting to express his bitterness in poems.

Objectively,

… I have not seen either of them in three years. The fact that she got married first does not prove at any point that she betrayed him. In three years, my friend may very well have had a dozen romances himself, and then made them last forever in his poems.

Not to mention that inspiration that one might need to create something does not necessarily come from their personal experiences.

You can only see clearly with your heart, not through some frozen versions.

It also happens to me to be locked in a frozen version implanted in the perception of other people.

Some people around me only see me through the last version they knew and have this pleasure to deduce that everything I create has a link to some old stories, especially when my work might bring about some melancholic feelings.

Maybe that’s why I feel more comfortable when my blog readers or video viewers do not know me in real life. There is less risk that someone would try to unravel the hidden meaning of my artwork by trying to stick a frozen version of my past onto it.

I remember a conversation that stunned me at the end of a screening for a short film project that I was involved in. As I was talking with the crew and a group of viewers, a man I knew invited himself into the discussion:

“Oh, from the beginning I was able to see this the story between you and G. in this film! There is no need to hide it, I know you so well, I understand your suffering, especially through the monologue that sounded like a poem…”

That day, all the objections that I made before the audience were seen as pure denial by this man, despite the three years of difference from the frozen version of me with G. to the screening day of my short film.

What is hilarious is that the monologue mentioned by this man was not my creation. It was my friend who wrote it, the same friend who started writing poetry three years later.

Maybe this friend has always been a poet at heart. I just did not realize it before.