They say that artists and writers possess a certain strangeness that cannot be put into words alone.

They see a world quite different from the one inhabited by ordinary men. Where others observe a dying rose, they witness the final surrender of something once beautiful. Where others hear the rain against a window, they hear the desperate knocking of memories long buried. Even silence has a voice, and in its quietest hours, it speaks most cruelly.

There is no ordinary existence for such creatures.

Everything is felt beneath the skin, in the marrow of their bones, in the delicate chambers of a heart that has never learned the art of indifference. They suffer from sorrows without names and mourn things that have not yet died. They are visited by melancholy as faithfully as the moon visits the night, and sometimes they cannot distinguish between the sadness they carry and the sadness they have gathered from the world.

Yet it is this very affliction that makes their love unlike any other.

To be loved by an artist is to be discovered.

Not as the world has fashioned you, nor as you have so carefully presented yourself, but as you exist beneath the elaborate disguises of human nature. They will find the frightened child beneath your arrogance, the tenderness concealed within your cruelty, and the wounds you have spent a lifetime convincing others were never there.

Their touch carries an electricity that has little to do with flesh. Their voices linger in empty rooms long after their departure. They remember the smallest things, the forgotten words, the trembling of a hand, the sorrow behind a smile offered too quickly.

And they will love you there.

In those dreadful, unlovely places where you have never permitted another soul to wander.

They do not demand perfection, for they have spent their lives finding beauty in the ruined. A crumbling cathedral, a forgotten grave, a portrait whose eyes have been worn away by centuries. They understand that darkness does not always signify evil, and that some of the most extraordinary things have grown from soil disturbed by grief.

They will not ask you to march obediently through life according to the expectations of others.

They will take your hand beneath a storm-darkened sky and invite you to dance while the heavens threaten to fall. They will laugh at the absurdity of existence, kiss the scars you have learned to hide, and encourage the insane little dreams you abandoned when the world convinced you to become respectable.

For they know that a soul deprived of wonder is little more than a beautifully dressed corpse.

But there is a sorrowful consequence to loving such a creature.

One must understand that the imagination is not a pastime to be indulged when convenient. It is the very breath within their lungs.

An artist does not simply invent.

They descend.

Into the forgotten chambers of memory, beneath the dirt and rubble of ordinary existence, where abandoned feelings lie waiting to be unearthed. They reach into the darkness with trembling hands and retrieve what others have buried, feared, or failed to recognize.

From the belly of their imagination, they bring forth something that did not exist the moment before.

A painting that gives shape to an unnamed grief. A story that resurrects a forgotten life. A melody that causes a stranger to weep without understanding why.

And what a terrible thing it is to demand that such a soul become ordinary.

To ask the painter to abandon the canvas, the writer to silence the pen, the dreamer to surrender the worlds that visit them in sleep.

It is not merely the destruction of a gift.

It is the slow burial of someone still breathing.

For their creations are not separate from them. Every sentence contains a fragment of their existence. Every brushstroke bears the evidence of something endured. Even their most beautiful inventions have been purchased with pieces of themselves that will never be returned.

And still, they give.

How generously they give.

They will build entire kingdoms from the smallest kindness. They will turn an insignificant afternoon into a memory that survives decades. They will find something magnificent in the person who has long since ceased to find magnificence within themselves.

Yet those who receive such devotion do not always recognize its rarity.

Some mistake gentleness for weakness. Some grow accustomed to being understood without ever attempting to understand. Others become so comfortable beneath the warmth of another’s imagination that they forget who has been tending the fire.

Until one evening, the artist grows quiet.

There is no grand accusation. No theatrical farewell beneath a weeping moon. Only the dreadful stillness of a heart that has finally understood the difference between being loved and being consumed.

And when they depart, they do not take back the beauty they have given.

The rooms remain filled with their memories. The ordinary things they once touched retain a strange and unbearable significance. A familiar song becomes impossible to hear. A certain hour of evening acquires an inexplicable sadness. Even laughter begins to sound like an echo of something irretrievably lost.

For to lose an artist is not simply to lose someone who loved you.

It is to lose the person who taught your world to speak.

The wanderers, the inventors, the melancholy architects of impossible things were never meant to remain where their souls could not breathe. They belong to the unseen currents of existence, to the mysteries concealed beneath familiar faces, to the strange and wondrous places where reality has not yet learned to impose its limitations.

They will continue to discover what others have forgotten to see.

They will find poetry in the ashes, tenderness in the monstrous, and life in the places where everyone else has declared it impossible.

And perhaps that is their greatest tragedy.

They can make something beautiful from nearly anything.

Even the sorrow of having loved someone who could never understand them.

But somewhere, in a room grown unbearably silent, there will remain a person who once possessed an entire universe and mistook it for an ordinary heart.

Only then will they understand.

The artist did not take the magic when they left.

They were the magic.

(Little Lion Man-Mumford and Sons:)