When a scene ends it’s always a little hard to let go. Especially a scene where you’ve truly grown in, sunk your teeth into the work, and started to truly merge that character with yourself. You’re leaving a little bit of yourself behind as you continue to move forward into a different character.
You’re also leaving behind a partner and another character they’ve grown to inhabit. A journey ends with someone where you both have struggled, failed, and rejoiced together many times over. I can’t help but feel like I’m leaving a little bit of myself behind; someone I’ve grown to love in all their faults and wonders. Someone in who I have opened the floodgates to certain truths and vulnerabilities inside for an audience to see. It’s like saying goodbye to an old friend, and I was never one who was good at saying goodbyes. I hope we see each other again sometime soon.
Yet, onward we must move into a new piece and character. While it might be hard to say goodbye, I really do love this aspect of the work too. I love it because it keeps things changing. This hunger for this craft grows in me with every new scene and character I get to take on. It’s a new challenge and opportunity to take everything I have learned and built upon in the past and put into this new creation. Another piece of my heart and soul gets to be stretched and infused in this character and more vulnerabilities are pressed to come to the surface.
It’s the true beauty of our art in my eyes. Each character becomes a new canvas to paint on with the colors of our soul. Every new character is a new experience of growth, like a hermit crab slowly moving into larger and larger shells. In that same vain though our progress can permeate backwards into our older characters as we step back into their skin and stretch it out with more experiences, work, and soulful color. So in a way we never truly say goodbye. Our work is ever moving forward and as such our characters are ever growing with us.
This goodbye then is rather temporary. A reprieve to continue growing as an artist and when the time comes to once again step into the life of File there will be more to fill it. So do not fret my friend, I will never truly say goodbye to you. For even if I wanted to how could I? You have become me and I have become you.