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<div class="center"><h1>Epigraph: The Last Archive of My Thirties</h1></div> <div class="epigraph">… for this book should not exist, and yet I am unable to destroy it or to share its burden. May these lines serve as a confession of the biggest sin that implies I have written it. [...] Pray the bones in the sky that my suspicions are correct and no one will ever have the least desire of setting eyes on this abomination. Juan Cavendra, //Los huesos del cielo//</div> Today’s my birthday and I cry if I want to. Once said that, let me start with a confession: I’ve never had the will nor the talent to finish a creative project. I’ve had the curiosity to start many things, though, but they never stick for long. I’ve also dreamed about them, worked on them incessantly inside my head, but haven’t dared to translate them into the concrete world. Call it insecurity, lack of skill, the irrational fear of constant failure, the certainty that everyone will hate everything I do, or worse, that no one will ever read it. Planning this endeavor was easy and fun, but to execute it, build it and—//gasp!//—set it free has cost me the so called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmE9f-TEutc" target="_blank">blood, sweat and tears</a> //*wink, wink*//. And since I’m already doing this, allow me a second confession: yes, this is going to be about BTS. My third, and—I hope—last confession today is that this “epigraph” is being published in a raw state. No copyedits or rewrites adorn this words because even though the whole project I’m introducing is about epigraphs, I have //thoughts// about them and I don’t want to ramble interminably while I write and delete and delete some more. I grew up reading books with epigraphs. Go find some short story collection by a Latin-American author and it’ll most surely have one (or several). My creative upbringing was marked by the idea that most, if not all, literary projects must be in conversation with the “literary canon” (whatever it means) and have the words of someone else explain, contradict, question or create a whole world around them. IMHO, that’s kind of presumptuous. But what if that someone else is yourself, or a made up character? What if the canon is some made-up bullshit, or nothing? Now we’re talking because I also have //thoughts// about books that only exist within books and fake references and how I release myself of responsibility when I put my incomplete words/worlds in the mouth of some made-up guy. I said I didn’t want to ramble, but today’s my birthday and… Over a year ago, Kim Nam-joon (i.e. RM of BTS) released //<a href="https://ibighit.com/bts/eng/discography/rm/detail/indigo/" target="_blank">Indigo</a>//, an album that changed the way I see my own creative process. He didn’t only have a series of songs deeply related to forms of expression different than music like visual and plastic arts, but a response to the idea of the eternal grind and how artists feel pressured to be constantly producing without a moment of respite to reflect and mature. The album had very simple packaging that showed a minimalist set of instructions for when/how “to use” it. Like poetry, it didn’t need more than words to be rich in meaning. Its existence made me wish I had a cover like that for one of my rather nonexistent books. //Indigo// did another thing that changed me: it was presented as “the last archive of [Namjoon’s] twenties.” A sort of diary or record (in every sense) of the then 28-year-old’s creative concerns and journey into finding his own mature voice as an artist just before he turned 30. I’m exactly ten years older than RM and way less talented, but I’m also trying to find and settle my voice in the midst of my community’s productivity and word count “olympics.” I’m a very slow writer and I tend to work on things that are hard to sell to regular magazines. ''Interactive fiction has entered the chat.'' I turned 30 years old on the last full year I lived in Mexico, I didn’t know then that I’d move two times between continents and that I’d end up liking k-pop. The only thing that is a constant between then to now that I’m one year away to be 40 is fiction writing. I’ve been writing and publishing on and off during those years, and I’ve also been playing on an off with <a href="https://twinery.org" target="_blank">Twine</a> and other ways to create interactive fiction. But pay attention to the words I purposely used: IF is something that I had mostly kept to myself until now that I’m attempting to compile the last archive of my thirties. Let’s imagine this thing you're reading, then, as my own //Indigo//, a repository of some of those things that I’ve worked on through the years, not a sample of my work, but a peek into my documents folder and into the epigraphs taken from a book that doesn’t exist (and will never exist), but is in conversation with EVERYTHING. //Los Huesos del Cielo - Epigraphs// is in no way a book, nor it pretends to be a chapbook or some other compendium of narrative. It is, if at all, a ''mixtape'' that will take a whole year to assemble and that, with some luck, will emulate the album that inspire it and be used “when flowers bloom or fall”. <div class="epigraph">Somewhere in California, December 18th 2023.</div> <button onclick="window.location='http://www.ifnotgames.com/huesos-del-cielo/menu.html';">Back to Menu</button> <hr style="width:50%; margin-left:25% !important; margin-right25% !important;" color="black"><div class="attribution">© Copyright Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas</div>