Chapter 5: "Body's a work of art you'd die to see."

Happiness is what I’ve been chasing my whole life. I always hope that one day I’ll finally feel it, that this heavy, suffocating weight on my chest will lift, that obsessive thoughts that haunt me every day will stop running in circles, that I’ll find peace within my mind.

Maybe that hope has something to do with my idea of being with someone, of love. I hope I’ll find somebody, and our love will be calm, steady, beautiful, and peaceful. But honestly, I never wished for it to be beautiful, only happy. Peaceful. I just want to be happy.

For all my life, pain has been my safety. It’s the emotion I understand best and I return to it over and over again. It’s been the greatest source of my inspiration — in art, writing, design, storytelling, film, everything. Everything, everything, everything. My pain is what I translate into something beautiful, something overwhelming, something intense. And as painful as it looks, it moves people. It always has. It’s become my language, and strangely, my power.

I love Vincent van Gogh and Alexander McQueen because I see myself in them. Part of our stories overlap: the loneliness, the isolation, the madness, the ache to be understood, the hunger for meaning, the unending search for beauty. We all share one thing: pain. That pain, as unbearable as it can be, is also fertile. It gives birth to creation, to life, to a reflection of humanity itself.

For so long, I thought happiness was my destination, something I had to reach. I prayed that God would grant it to me one day. And for a while, I believed He did. And for a moment, I thought I had found it. I felt powerful, untouchable, like I had finally climbed to the top of the mountain and I was finally standing on top of the world. But it wasn’t real. It was an illusion; it’s fleeting, delusional, unreal.

Because one day, I fell. Hard. From the top to the very bottom. And I woke up in a hospital bed. I remember the numbness spreading through my body when I opened my eyes. The fog pressing down on my head. I could barely process the world around me, not even my own thoughts. My head ached, my body felt heavy, and all I wanted was to lie still on my bed and close my eyes forever. The only thing I felt was the absence of feeling. And that terrified me more than pain ever could. Because for the first time, even pain—my greatest source of power—was gone. And I didn’t know who I was without it.

I remember the doctor asking me, “Have you ever tried to create art from a peaceful, happy state of mind? Like Picasso — he had periods of tranquility too.”
And I remember thinking:

All my life, I had been chasing happiness. But maybe, deep down, I never really wanted to. Because if I became happy and stopped feeling pain, would I still be able to create? Would I still feel alive? Pain has always made me feel safe. It’s what I know, what I can rely on. I’m not used to happiness. So I started to see happiness as something unsafe. I think that’s why people find it so hard to change, because we’re addicted to what hurts us. Because comfort can exist even in suffering. Because even when something hurts, it feels familiar. And what’s familiar feels safe. So we stay where it’s familiar, even when it destroys us. Maybe that’s why I’ve always found ways to keep my pain alive. Maybe that’s why, subconsciously, I’ve always held onto my pain; I keep it close, even when I say I want to let it go. Maybe that’s why sometimes I imagine and recreate painful moments in my mind, even when they never really happened or they never existed. Because pain protects me. It defines me. Because who am I without it? What happens if I wake up one day and the pain is gone? What kind of person would I be then? What kind of character would I live? What kind of art could I make?

Because without it, I don’t know who I’d be. Because pain has become me. It has become my identity and I’ve identified with it. You know, it’s both a gift and a curse. A gift, because it makes me see everything in detail. That’s why I can create, why I can feel beauty so sharply. That’s a gift of pain: it gives you depth. But it’s also a curse. Because even something that happened ten years ago can still appear and come alive in front of me, as if it’s happening again. I can see it. I can feel it. And no one else remembers. They’ve forgotten. But I haven’t. No one else remembers, but I do. I always do.

And that’s the curse: to remember everything too deeply, to feel everything too much, to turn it all into art and call it survival.

J'écris des chansons, je n'les chante pas — I write songs, but I don’t sing them
Et ton nom, je n'le dis pas — And your name, I don’t say it
C'est des histoires que tu t'inventes — They’re just stories you make up
Romance d'un soir si ça t'enchante — A one-night romance, if that pleases you
Faut pas le dire mais c'était court — Don’t say it, but it was short
Faut pas l'écrire ça pue l'amour — Don’t write it down, it reeks of love
Ça sert à rien, pourquoi courir — It’s useless, why run after it
Il y en a plein des filles désir — There are plenty of “desire girls”
Ce que tu touches tu le détruis — Everything you touch, you destroy
Mon corps se couche sur ton ennui — My body lies down on your boredom
J'ai fait l'impasse sur les mots doux — I gave up on sweet words
Comme une terrasse en plein mois d'août — Like a terrace in the middle of August
Fais pas semblant car je le sais — Don’t pretend, because I know
Tu ne m'aimes que parce que je te hais — You only love me because I hate you
Mais c'est pas grave, tant pis — But it’s okay, whatever
J'prendrai un taxi — I’ll take a taxi
La possibilité de t'aimer comme gravir une montagne — The possibility of loving you is like climbing a mountain
J'l'ai déjà envisagé, tu peux sortir le champagne — I’ve already imagined it — you can open the champagne
Je veux commencer quelque chose de nouveau — I want to start something new
Laisse-moi espérer un avenir plus beau — Let me hope for a more beautiful future
J'ai loué une voiture — I rented a car
J'suis parti à la mer — I went to the sea
Toute seule, j'te jure — All alone, I swear
Voyage en solitaire — A trip in solitude