Perhaps, I was a bit early, or maybe I was a hundred years too late, but I could not talk all day about the surface-level depth of my contemporaries. I could not do it, and I had to pay with my share of disappointment. I could not write a thousand poems about loving oneself without talking about or touching upon individual responsibility or consequences and reparations. I did not have in me shallow words of inspiration slyly manufactured to make people entertained, not persuaded. I did not, could not write in titles and words that will sell. I could not write for a market. I did not, could not subscribe to an idea served to me on a platter. All I could do was show a mirror to the life that awaited all of us tomorrow, and that was all there was to me.
I often thought because of these limitations and them alone, I would be the death of me; for how long can one brave the tide, and for how long can one say: I shall not move? Now I know it is this zeitgeist, these present days. The times will end me in all possible ways. And years from whenever that happens, when all is said and done, when the time is right, if it ever arrives, they will look at all this and say, he was one of them, the ones who braved the tide, and even though he drowned, he drowned honestly. And in it, in that moment and no other, I will have done what I was here to do. And in it, I will have served my purpose, whatever it may be, but until then, I have to keep swimming against the current to share the truth the way I see it, for months, for years, for decades.
They talk about the gift of being able to knit words together; they never talk about the curse of anachronism. Most of us were out of time, out of place in the grand scheme of things, out of the present day, and entirely out of touch with everything. We were a little bit early, but mostly, we were centuries too late.