THE ESSENCE

2025. As of today, I remain unconvinced whether the ‘essence’ of that particular year will one day finally cease its parasitic clinging onto my..., if only body, the very clinging with which I associate leeches. My hope is that one day that very leaching will at last stop preying upon my vitality, my vigor, my whole self, if only just artistic.

The arrival of 2025 had no right to feel that excruciatingly exhausting. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it had been only four full months since the birth of my novelist identity, exclusively in a direction of original fiction production where the history of its screenplay predecessors was of little to no importance. By the arrival of the year that would mark one quarter of my life, though I had an experience in original fiction writing spanning slightly more than one full season, prior to that I had already exhausted my creative well more than once: I had years wasted practicing the composition of screenplays in Russian, another span of seasons dissolved in the chase after a literature degree, its significance lying less in being literature and more in being the best next thing close to my filmmaking dream, and then a further expanse of youth consigned to an obsession, the one teetering on the edge of being possessed, an obsession with piling up screenplays written in English, all to end up being not the final destination itself, but a bridge toward their adaptation into prose.

My body beginning to feel exhaustion was valid. Yet there was something that whispered that all of that was just a mere excuse to surrender. Hence, flirting with my vanity, a hostage to my pride, I vowed not to falter. And that is so amusing, considering how the moment almost felt like a déjà vu. And not even the one of the second time.

Because my novel titled ‘I Made a Clone of You’ and its narrative trajectory had fractured into an inertia worthy of a heavy description of a gloomy abyss, I needed some other story to carry my momentum.

Immediately, on the 1st of January, I rushed to construe their first two to three pages. I felt ecstatic that day, and the one that followed. As a result, I ended up being deluded into the impression that my artistic reservoir had restored itself. Well, it hadn’t... for sure. It hadn’t, at least not for those four stories still in the process of having their plots cooked.

Though I gave up on those four stories immediately, unconsciously, but who knows, perhaps partially consciously too, I returned to the flow of ‘I Made a Clone of You.’

January of 2025 was the third month in a row I kept my creative streak going. And all of that for the sake of that one particular story.

Every time the story agreed for me to carry it, I would feel like drowning while listening to ‘The Essence’ by Aurora. Yet every time my soul, my heart, my mind, and every fiber of me failed to preserve the momentum, faltered to refill the dry well, fell short of carrying the story to its end without taking any hiatuses or detours, then I would find myself in a state where listening to the ‘soundtrack’ of my novel would become a labor no smoother, no easier, no clearer than the act of artistic creation itself.

As January 2025 was reaching for its exit, apparently without my agreeing to that, it called for ‘I Made a Clone of You’ to accompany it to the ritual of valediction.

As closer we got to the last month of the coldest season ever known, the harder it became to lose oneself in the ambiance the song in my ears could create, yet somehow now wouldn’t.

With the arrival of February 2025, the new story began to pave its way from its cocoon, once buried deeply in its cold and dark grave, meant to remain undetectable, yet somehow ending up being traceable.

Unlike the four stories I had contemplated bringing forth at the beginning of January, this one, which came with no rush and not even a warning, stayed longer than I could have first imagined it would. The cost, though, was that I was about to abandon ‘I Made a Clone of You’ for a much longer break, for a detour way more deeply invested.