https://opensea.io/collection/felisnotebook

LONELINESS

He took a drag of his cigarette, as always with his sight wandering far away and his brows furrowed. She looked at his profile with amusement.

"You look lonely when you put up a face like that while smoking," she said, "or are you?"

He looked at her for a second before exhaling a long white smoke away from her

"Are you?" He asked back. He gave out a thin, tight-lipped smile as he did so.

"Well," she shrugged her shoulder, "to me it's both a curse and an old friend. Especially now that I am walking my own path."

"Find friends," he said.

"I have friends," she chuckled, "it's just that once you get acquainted with loneliness, they stick with you regardless of friends. Or maybe I want something deeper."

He inhaled the nicotine again. The fire had burnt up more than half of the cigarette by now.

"Are you?" She asked again.

"Probably," he replied after a minute, "Probably because I chose to be, too"

ARROGANCE

"Do you like yourself?" He asked suddenly.

The girl raised her brows inquisitively but nevertheless gave it a thought as she shook her plastic coffee cup and bit the straw. "Yes and no," she said after a while, "I'm proud I am me but at the same time, I hate that I'm proud I am me. I brag sometimes but I regretted it afterward."

"You brag?" He asked back. His brows burrowed deep as he asked. When he moved his hand the ice in the bright-colored drink in his hand rattled in unison as if they are agreeing with him.

"I thought I do," she told him, "but I can't seem to tell whether I brag, or I confuse my insecurities with the thoughts of doing so."

How easy would it be for the ignorant The fool, the narrow-minded! For they live in their own world For their mind so simple, their soul at rest!

How nice  it must be for people to feel without guilt as they live for nothing but themselves and care not for the world outside their house

but I, I and my mind, I feel too deeply when I wish I do not at all** **So suffocating they were That they make me empty.

REALITY SHOW

On one particularly chilly day, she sits by the cafe window. A cup of warm latte is in her hand, a notebook nearby. As she blinks, her eyes trail along the street, watching people passing by the cafe. She watches them as if they are actors on TV and she is merely a viewer. She has been doing this numerous times, but still, every time she distances herself and views the world goes like a theatre behind a glass wall, cold, foreign loneliness will catch her unguarded. She can never see that coming, nor she can tell if they actually came to her. All that she knows is when it comes, it will catch her in between her ribcage.

"Do these people know sadness?" she will ask herself every time, "it is strange knowing that among these people walking on the street, someone may be thinking of their loved ones while the person next to him may be lonely. Someone may feel alive and blessed but at the same time the person behind him was planning a suicide."

She looks at the empty chair in front of her. He isn’t there but she can smell his usual cigarette scent. She knows what he would say,

"That's people. They are selfish. They just are."

It is strange that people are alive, and they are selfish, and it's natural, and here she is, watching them as if she is not one of them.

夢-Yume

"I had a dream last night. A man was walking alone in a field of snow without shoes. Two young male lions were with him and he looked like he was lost in his own thought."

He munched on his lunch quietly, waiting for the girl to go on with her stories.

"Do you think it's strange?" She asked a question instead. "It's a dream," he said nonchalantly, "it's supposed to be."

"I wonder where did he come from," she said, "and why did he look so sad."

The girl looked around, noticing each one of the people walking about, living their own life. She began to realize that just like she knew nothing about that man in her dream, she knew nothing about other people's lives as they, too, knew nothing of her. Even him. Even her. Even both of them.

"Are you going for a smoke?" She asked.

"Later," he said.

Ah, so much love

So many broken pieces

PARTING

"We haven't talked for quite some time, I guess you were busy," a sweet, female voice emerged from the voicemail, "I hope you are doing good."

A pause ensued. He inhaled smoke, phone on an ear.

"I don't think I'll be returning soon. Even if I do, I don't think I would want to see you around anymore. It really isn't comfortable for both of us... for me at least. Sorry to sound dramatic but I guess I suck at this kind of thing."

"Okay, I'll be going," she added after a short chuckle, "Wish you well."

The voicemail ended. He shoved his phone back into his front jeans pocket and lit up another cigarette. Exactly at that second, the rain started to pour down quietly behind him.

I will not explain in detail about them. You are free to interpret their characters and their relationship as you want.

Mirror has gone full Optimism now so you cannot collect this article on the mainnet anymore.
If you wish to collect but don’t want to do it on Optimism, you can collect the related NFT here:

https://opensea.io/collection/felisnotebook

PRISON

She took the still lit cigarette from between his lips. He frowned, but let her be.

"how about finding solace in something else other than smoking?" she pressed the cigarette on the ashtray.

He looked at her, then away. His gaze traveled far past the drop of rain trickling down the cafe window, but his mouth remained shut. It's not like he didn't want to. He couldn't, or maybe he chose not to. The nicotine was his only way to run from the pain of getting trapped inside the prison he built himself.

KINTSUKUROI

"Here," she pressed her finger on his chest, "something is missing. A crack you've been hiding instead of fixing. Here I see you sit behind the wall you built, hoping someone will come and fix it for you... But how can anyone fill that void up if you don't let them?"

"Woman," he grabbed her hand and stared right into her, "you should first tell that to yourself. How much longer are you planning to hide from your truth?"

After El-Nino,

Was a field of flowers in a desert

So why do you think an oasis like you

will dry up and die?

You will be fine

MASK

"They told me to smile and behave in ways that aren't myself," she began, then shook her head, "I didn't. I refuse to lie."

"It's the kind of people they all want, types of personality they look for," He replied, "They told me the same thing. Bullshit, heh.”

She glanced at his figure and wondered if he said it out of pettiness, or out of honesty. He wears masks all the time; perhaps it was for survival. She knows well when one wishes to survive in the real world, one must conform to the majority. One must be bright, appear cheerful, not too smart, and be neat. One’s way of speaking must be pleasant, on top of that, they are better to be good-looking.

"True," she smiled, "People like us are often misunderstood."

He gave off a smirk and lit a cigarette. Tomorrow he has to put on that mask and fight to survive, again.

RE-BIRTH

"Take it all out"

she said

"All the things that have been bothering you for years, take it all out. All the monstrous thoughts you've kept for so long in your head, the things keeping you awake at night, take them all out. Uncage your heart, and removes all the thorns you've been growing around yourself. Your fear, your ugliest thoughts, your hurting wounds, your hate, your long expired hope growing to obsession and agony, your darkness, all the things you have been using to torture yourself, take them all out. Put them in the spotlight. Tell them to someone who cares about you or if you can't, then write it down and burn it. Free yourself, love yourself."

"You deserve more than loneliness. You deserve to heal."

He closed his eyes and inhaled his cigarette deeply.

Darling go to sleep, go to sleep It’s late, You’re tired. Look at the stars, they’re blinking, they’re sleepy.

Darling, go to sleep are you crying? that’s alright, you may break I will keep all the pieces together so you will lose nothing when you wake up

Darling, go to sleep, I am here tonight, It will all be alright.

ELEISON

"Do you think I can forgive her?" He suddenly asked. She turned to him, surprised at the sudden question. She knows whom he was meant by ‘her’, he told her before.

"Well why not," she replied, "I think you can."

"I don't think I can," he said.

"Why?" She asked back.

"What she did was wrong and terrible. She does not deserve it"

She gave it some thought and said again, "well you're right, but I think you should. She won't feel guilty anyway, so why bother keeping the anger? It will only hurt yourself."

He looked at her, then shrugged his shoulder as he looked away. Perhaps she was right. He thought. Perhaps he should.

I separated the writings into a few posts, this part will contain my musing and short poems, and the next one will be a collection of mini-fictions.

Although short, I hope you enjoy this writing!

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If humans weren’t born as social beings

Would we know loneliness?

The mention of your name

raises an aching rage in the hollows of my ribs

and it is what keeps me safe

from the demon of my head

but even sometimes the air weighs the lungs

and beating heart causes paranoia

Loneliest in crowd be loved in solitude You are but a contradiction of truth and this is true for the best way for a candle to shine is to place it in the darkest room.

I want to scream in poetry

like a storm above Tokyo

I want to bleed in painting,

I want to run, I want to crash

I want to cry, uncontrollably like a child

I want to violate the rule, the society

like bombs tearing apart towns and cities

I was born to fight with the sky

Made to love like the sun

Built to care like the rain

When I see through a mirror

I saw no one but myself;

But,

Sometimes I could not recognize

These sorrowful eyes.

Then,

Perhaps it wasn’t me.

Perhaps it was my soul

Is it strange to be drawn to chaos?

Like how I always think cigarettes are beautiful

even though I know it kills

Yes, they say, Yes it is.

So years pass and I believed so,

until you came and re-lit the thoughts.

Grief is just love with no place to go.

-Jamie Anderson

Introduction to Collection

I have always considered love and grief to be the two sides of the same coins; the staple emotion of human experiences. They are deeply intertwined, for you cannot grief if you did not love. Plus, is there anyone on earth who has never loved and never grieved, whether for someone else or for themselves? (the answer is obviously: yes, there might be, but that would be the psychopathologist area of expertise, not a romanticist artist like me).

I have lost people and pets to death, some to old age, some to illness, two to suicide. I still grief over them. The last two hit particularly hard, despite them being simply ‘acquaintances’. There is just something about suicide that snaps you out of your tiny bubble. Its news somehow always punches into you the realization that the world is kind to one but not to another.

The greatest love and the greatest grief I have ever experienced, however, is the one directed to myself. I will not go into great length and details, for it risks turning this writing into a sob story. Do not get me wrong, I have nothing against angsts, but I would very much like to avoid a situation where I appear as a victim in one. All I will say, is that I have once lost myself in a period of self-loathe that was so strong it drove my will to live away. It took me years to see myself in a better light. It took me years to realize that all along, I was rejecting my own love to the self. That love eventually turned to decades long grief I couldn’t escape from. Even now, I am still sometimes grieving for the past me. You cannot escape grief, after all. You can only grow around it. You can only accept it as a part of yourself, of the person whose love once had nowhere to go.

So ingrained was the emotion and this awareness that it eventually become my muse. I believe that love and grief (along with some other emotions, naturally) becomes a recurring pattern in my creations, be it painting or writings. And so, this collection is a homage to those experiences, an experience that I am sure both of you (reader) and I are very familiar with.

Concept and Execution

Were human not born as social being, would we know loneliness?

This collection will houses various digital paintings depicting two original character of mine: a half-monster and a human. These characters were originally created to explore the feeling of alienation versus freedom, but their story eventually boils down to love and grief; of connecting and disconnecting from the self and from other people.

I especially highlight a half-monster character in this collection. I find that people who feel like they are not worthy of love often feels like they are less of a human and more of a creature, a monster, a demon. At the very least, Osamu Dazai kind of did in his writings: ‘no longer human’. After all, monsters and demon are supposed to be scary and villainous aren’t they? At least that’s what the catholic church taught me since I was little. Until one day I learned that animals attack when provoked, and that violence is a learned behavior. Surely the monsters were scary because we drove them to a corner? Since then, I became fascinated with the image of a monster whose nature is love, instead of an unreasonable hatred.

“But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?”

-Mark Twain

Further, the idea of romance between human and a non-human creature has always fascinated me. In my own words years ago, ‘it’s easy to love a perfect person, but it takes courage to love someone who was less than perfect.’ Yet, it is that kind of romance that makes the best story. It is that kind of courage to love that puts romantic in romance. This is exactly the concept for the other character, the human girl who fought nail and tooth to be with someone of her choice.

Most of the artworks in this collection will depict both characters together in various setting and concept, all within the boundary of love, grief, and their various interpretations. With this collection, I am seeking to explore new things, either by incorporating surrealistic, decorative or symbolistic elements into the illustration, or by trying out new mechanics that I hope will make a more meaningful bidding experience.

Stamp and Other Technicalities

• The artworks will be minted on Foundation under the collection ‘Amoris Pretium Luctus’. No collaboration is planned so far.

• I create all my artworks using Paint tool SAI and Clip Studio Paint

• Bidder stamps will be offered for each artwork. I might add extra mechanic for stamps and collectors of article editions in the future

• I plan to release short articles and/or writing accompaniment for each artworks. They will mainly be rewriting of my old poems and musing. They will be collectable through mirror.

• There is no fixed release schedule. I am busy and I will be juggling this project with a mini and affordable pfp/murder mystery project, so do not expect a lot of releases in a short time.

Trivia

• The red-haired man is definitely not based on Robek.

• His name is Attila. In the original universe, he was the descendant of a group of creatures called ‘fairies’. He has a long thick tail that resembles a Komodo dragon’s. His body is half covered with black scales that glow bluish green under the sun. He moves around rather slowly due to a defect in his left ankle. He has a soft and gentle nature.

• The blonde girl was originally a man named ‘Istvan’. Here, he is a lady that runs a scent shop that sells various incense, perfume and scented candles. Her nature remains the same: stubborn, and can be quite scary when she’s angry. Here, her name is Eszter.

• They both ran away from home and discarded their family names. Now they are living a quiet life in a small town somewhere in Asia.