#everything feels like a dream .... like it isnt real anymore and im really losing focus on everything i used to love

[chnsfairy]

w_______w

[zombiezomm]

Here i go again chasing after another girl who im almost positive is fucking with me. why. why do i keep doing this to myself. why am i even mad? shes not even mine. why do i get so enraged when i see other comments on your videos. why do i get so upset when my texts go hours with no response. why am i trying to make myself believe we could actually work. i have no right to be upset over you. you arent mine. as much as i want you to be. as much as i crave your attention im not entitled to it. and you arent obligated to do anything for me. maybe thats why im so stuck in my head. because i know im not the only one pursuing you. you can be ripped away from me at any given moment by someone who is available. im in a 7 year relationship and almost 2,000 miles away from you. why am i trying to pursue this. ive been through this before. idk if ill make it out entirely the same again. but something keeps pushing me toward you. its like you sense all of my anxiety and just know when to text me right before i do something ill regret. i never want to lose what we have. and i contemplate ways to make us happen everyday. Something is really different this time. ive had plenty of girls walk into my life over the years that i felt like i needed to chase. most of it was for sex. others were for something i wasnt getting at home. but you, you came when nothing was wrong in my life. my relationship was stable. i was doing things right. and then you show back up in my life after 12+ years and suddenly your all i think about. suddenly your all that matters. your happiness is like gold and your smile is worth millions. your the one on my mind when i wake up and right before i fall asleep. your the one i want to call when im excited about something. your the one i want to curl up with at night and snuggle. your the one i want to experience new things with. your the one im falling in love with. and ive been in love before. many many times. This is different. this is the feeling thats written about in books and movies. its like floating in space. theres no real sense of time. your mind kind of races all over the place but can only focus on one thing. its like breathing. i think i love you. and that terrifies me. because i know im going to be the most vulnerable ive ever been with anyone and you have the power and ability to completely and utterly destroy me. You say you wont and you want me and this life we dream about but how can i be sure of that from where i am. Again why am i even stressing about this, you arent even mine. and i dont want to hold you back in life. i want you to be free to do what makes your heart and soul happy. and at the end of the day if that isnt me i have no choice but to try to be happy for you. but god do i want it so bad. tonight i looked up at the stars and asked for one thing. you. i am falling in love with you. every day i contemplate leaving my situation for you. i know you said only do it for me and not you but lately i dont feel like me without you. i wish i could explain everything thats going on in my head. i wish i understood what the universe was trying to tell me when you showed back up. i just hope im reading it right and not fucking up my life even more. i really fucking like you. id give up the world to be with you. i just need to know youd do the same for me. i wish i didnt get so stuck in my head like this. i guess im not sleeping tonight. and im not too sure what to write anymore. i just really fucking like you and i want this to work so badly. ughhh why. what are you doing to me. your making me feel things. your breaking down the walls. something that hasnt been done in over 10 years. that last time they came down i almost didnt make it. please dont destroy me. please.

[kosmicdream]

Your Comic Baby

You know that comic or story that you made when you were a teenager (or sometimes even younger) that propelled you to really WANT to create it. FOR REAL. You put all your energy towards it, for years, determined that it was going to be the one you HAD to make. But then something doesnt go right because, comics are hard-- so you start over and over and over and each reboot gets a bit more discouraging because you have SO MUCH planned out for this thing and you’re just stuck in the loop of redoing the first 5 pages every couple of years. But something about that story, you just cant let go of. You still want to make it happen because you’ve invested and dedicated so much into it. I know that feeling. I call those stories.. your Comic Baby.

You might have a lot of babies. I know I do. But there’s always this one certain comic baby that i struggle with more than the others. Its a difficult baby because I first made this baby when I was 13. And over the course of my highschool years, I was very outspoken about how i was going to really make this a real book for everyone to read. I was constantly working on it, even taking sketchbooks and clipboards to draw it or the characters in class. People were waiting to read this story because they could see how passionate about it I was. But comics were a lot harder than I thought they would be in my mind. I mean, i knew they would be difficult but it was like my art wasn’t as good as I knew it could be when i drew comics. I didn’t get it. And I’d learn so much and so fast that once i got one chapter finished and ready to read, i didn’t like it anymore.

This process went on until i graduated highschool. This dream of making a comic. Specifically THIS comic. I had a lot of stories i was planning on doing, but there was this one comic i really REALLY invested just. My maximum comic energy into. It was different from the other comics and stories. Not that the other ones werent good, they just didnt have the same bond with me that I had with this story. This comic baby was gonna be the thing i was going to be known for and be the first comic i would presented into the world. And in the end.. it actually wasn’t.

I mean, it was, in a way. Eggshells is a prequel to that baby comic. Set in the same universe. Part of the same story, more like a mini test version reboot of the One True Baby Comic. I decided to give the comics thing another try and started to work on eggshells in August 2011, then to ink in Febuary 2012 and finally started to post it in 2013.. sometime.

I took a really long break from comics between finishing highschool and starting eggshells. I would try here and there, but not getting this baby comic out when i was still IN highschool somehow made me feel like a failure of an artist. I was very hard on myself. I didn’t really know if i was even capable of BEING a comic artist because my comics weren’t coming out how i wanted and I couldn’t finish anything. Besides that, I didn’t even know if I could even make them as a career. (I still don’t know if I can but I know I’m going to continue to try.)

When I decided to start Eggshells, i decided that it would be another attempt at my favorite baby comic because I knew that if any of my stories had the emotional legs to motivate me to get through to the final page-- it would be that one. That special baby comic. I poured so much work into planning and preparing everything in a very tradition sense. Scripts, thumbnails, drawing layouts and props and character turn arounds.. ect ect.

Then the fire happened and I lost my ‘comic bible’ of sorts. The rough draft sketches of the entire thing. It was very sad.

But even before then, actually inking pages was not very fun. Because the process i made for it was .. not very fun. I was running into the same walls that I always had when rendering comic panels. It just was too slow and I couldn’t get a consistent look that i wanted. I wasn’t sure where to put detail (or balance the detail) so I would over render constantly. I would zoom in too much. I didn’t know how much to shade and word bubbles annoyed me. I wasn’t very satisfied and I would spend way too much time on each page.

I felt pretty exhausted after trying to ink it for one year and not even getting through the first chapter. Doubt and old dread of not being capable of a comic artist weighed on my shoulders. Of course then, when the fire happened, i just decided to put all that aside again. My life kinda was.. thrown in a loop.

Similarly, my life has been thrown in another one of those loops. A different kind but still, the same sort of disoriented “where the fuck should i live” kind of things. Some of these feelings have come back, the anxieties and unsureness but.. mostly just remembering about them rather than feeling the SAME things. I have acquired a sense of accomplishment in my art .. just with a totally different comic that came out of no-where. (the worm one, you know.)

My relationship with my art has changed so much at this point and I’m so.. not.. what i had predicted for myself?? Not in a negative way. its just odd. FFAK is such a different comic than i thought I would make too. I would describe the experience of working on FFAK as like, im in a shitty junkyard car and ive decided to slam on the gas as hard as i can and see how far it’ll go. Then it just didn’t stop. It took me on a fucking journey but at 90 miles per hour. No careful consideration, so much explicit violence and sex, aggressive confrontations and social commentary. Sex hat jokes. I really got to see a side of myself that this story continues to bring out. And as I worked on ffak more and more, I would sometimes look over at the passenger seat at the Comic Baby. Crossing their arms judgmentally at me and giving me a look like “Having fun? What about ME? Wasn’t I the important one to you?? Am I not special anymore???”

So sometimes i’d feel bad. And try to work on that one again.. but it didn’t make me feel good. I felt like i had to ride the FFAK wave because that was what was happening in the present and I was discovering too much about myself to go back to this older thing that i had a frustrating history with. It wasn’t that I didn’t LOVE the other story, it just didn’t feel right to work on then. So i just let myself focus on where my energy was wanting to go: The Worm Fucks. And the worm fuck comic is the one people read first. Its the first comic of my own i really got to.. read and experience more than just the first chapter. Its been amazing but its so weird. I feel like its a different kind of artist that makes it sometimes.

I don’t regret the worm fuck comic being the one I’m known for but its still funny to me how easily it might have never happened. If the fire hadn’t taken away so much of my work, I probably would be still slowly pushing out pages for eggshells. Or maybe I would have given up and moved on to do something else with my art career? I don’t know. All i know is what I ended up doing was this weird worm comic that is still going on for .. thousands of pages! and has no end in sight! I didnt even expect eggshells to last 1,000 pages but now I can tell my page-pacing is different than how i expected. I still haven’t even finished a comic yet. Its weird? Am I able to finish comics? I guess I don’t know yet because I haven’t. i might “know” endings to my stories but its very different when actually getting it done. I understand that life is more complicated than that and things like fires can change the circumstances in 10 minutes.

So I’m feeling a fear about this uncertain future I’m facing, I’m seeing that I have to make a lot of huge life changes for where I am going to live and what I have to do to make money to support myself. I’m scared that my routine ive established with FFAK will have to change. I wonder if I’ll never be able to replicate the same exact “throw it all into the wind” energy of working like I was able to.. at least I know I can’t right now, because I need to be careful and calculated again. My surroundings arent stable enough for me to dive headfirst into my projects.

With that I’ve noticed I’m drawing eggshells a little bit and enjoying it like I haven’t before. Is it what I need right now? It feels weirdly comforting to know that, no matter what the history i have with this comic, I’ll come back to it and continue to pick at it a little. it makes me feel like, no matter where I’m going to be in this world physically-- my comics will come along with me and they dont have to leave. they arent a product of circumstance. I can get right back on the horse. Its just part of my life that doesn’t have to go away or be taken away from me. Its a nice secure feeling that there’s this art thing isnt something I have to start over. I’d rather build on what I’ve got and it might take me a long time but I enjoy the journey. That feels good to me.

Anyway, even if I’m scared about where i’ll go from here I know i’ll have my car of screaming comic babies at all different ages that are demanding my attention. and some are more patient than others, i’ve totally ditched some babies along the way that i might pick back up later or merge with other babies through some horrific experiment. I’ll even make some new ones because life inspires me constantly and I have so many problems to sort out and what better way than to project on some cool anime characters. but i love all my comic babies!!!!!! and they love me. i have unique and interesting histories with all of them.

comic baby is such a creepy word but it really feels like they are your strange brain children that are also you. i don’t ever want children of my own, but i can see that i pour.. small small aspects of that i think that energy might be into my comics. (im not pretending its actually the same thing to be perfectly clear.) They take up all your time + energy and make you constantly lose sleep..and they grow distinct personalities that you dont expect and have to deal with.. people will judge you for them and how you “raise” them (make them), you’re endlessly proud of these babies and protective and shed tears for them and want them to SUCCEED and live on forever. you want other people to love them TOO and see the best parts of them, for all their flaws. You want em all to grow up as you hoped or planned but they wont at all. They’ll be totally different but also better than you could have imagined.

Comics & Art are such a special thing to get to experience. While i hope that i can make my dreams a reality with my art, I know that they’ll always be an integral part of my life + how i experience and see life and i’m so thankful ive decided to really let room for it there. Its amazing to me that i almost thought it wouldn’t. and i wasnt going to be allowed to be happy with my art because it wasn’t good enough and i wasn’t enough. but i am. and it is good.

Thank you for reading. -Kosmic

[sentiment-is-a-chemical-defect]

Closing my heart - Again

Just had probably the best week of my life, you know, the type of week that your crush kisses you back when you kiss her. The  type of week that you spend with your crush thinking she feels a way but really she feels another. I was wrong to think the pursuit of happiness is for me. I learned to love, but with it I must bear the risk of hatred. I dont know why I did it, I tried to think how and why, but all I can think about is her smile.

If you never share someone’s pain, you can never understand them. I could never see what hurt her. I dont even know what I did wrong for her to not love me back. I wish I could change my fate, but maybe this is who I am, the gallant who will never be loved back.

I want to go back to not feeling a thing towards anyone anymore, that me at least will not be heartbroken. Can you believe I almost cried today because shes leaving? Every tear tells a story because I dont cry for no reason. I lost faith in everything, One day my life is perfect the next its crushed in a million pieces.

I dont know, I saw something between us, I saw happiness, the way she talks to me with such tender love and care. I really messed up this time, I felt something true unlike the past people I fell for. I felt like I was invincible when im with her. But she is moving countries. Damn, can I be more unlucky? Why does this happen to me? What did I ever do to deserve this? 

Love breeds sacrifice, which in turn breeds hatred. Then you can know pain. And thats all I feel, pain. My heart shattered into a billion pieces. I made a mistake loving again, having too many bonds causes one to lose focus, weakening their strongest wish, their greatest desire. And my greatest desire was her.

“Wherever someone thinks of you, thats where home is”, this is funny, because all I do is think of her constantly. Love is a word sure, but it hurts so much when you realize it isnt there.

A smile doesnt always mean a person is happy, sometimes it simply means they are strong enough to face their problems. Yet all I do is smile, knowing she exists just gives me a reason to do things. Yet I didnt learn from the past, that falling in love never works. Love is a fairy tale. Time doesnt heal pain, it teaches me to live with it.

After years of being unable to cry because I felt nothing, today I broke knowing she was leaving. The pain hit my heart too hard. But a man cries not because he’s weak, but because he has been strong for too long.

My heart will eventually heal, but never again. Never have sentiment, it will be your downfall, no matter how real it is or how good it makes you feel, how happy, thinking you’re in a world of dreams. Dont. Sentiment is a chemical defect found in the losing side. You will lose your heart, your feelings, just like I am.

-SH