Soaked pages.

This is a freestyle. This is a drill.

My pages are soaked with want. That's why they are heavy. Deep, deep desire weighs on every line. It is a lust for the beyond. A discontent with the constraints of human mortality.

Is it ingratitude for the simple pleasure of having lived yesterday, and of experiencing today?

Is the simple hope of smelling tomorrow's air enough to console this need-strung heart?

No. Only my kind of heart sees the world as God created it: a vast, monstrous canvas. Beauty-in-potential everywhere. It is my kind of heart, my lustful heart, that truly appreciates the world, that snuggles into it every night, and embraces it every morning. It is my kind of soul that is excited at life the most even though I often wear a scowl: orange sunsets are charming paintings in the sky; that one second of a riff in that song is divine, I play it again and again and again; the feeling of the bed under my rapping fingers is a haptic pleasure beyond explanation.

It is my kind of soul that will miss this world because we love it so much. Why wouldn't we love it that bad? We have seen her in naked ways. Her lilt. Her scars. We have experienced life keenly, deeply.

We know from experience that there is more to enjoy, the cup is far from emptying. It's an endless waterfall. And we know from experience that much of the beauty in the world didn't come with it from the factory. People have made beautiful things. They have decorated the world, crowned her in magnificent jewelry. We want to paint her skin too. Elaborate, heartfelt markings. Let people see the canvas and say, see this drawing there? Over here ... Yes. It's Emmanuel's.

Is this vain? To lend water to the cup you have drunk from? To give back? To desire so deeply to create beauty? To feel guilty at only consuming and enjoying the toil of others? Is it vain to desire to make the world more beautiful? To make people smile? To help make this meaningless, miserable, sad ball of rock sprout in joy, and purpose?

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You may not know this: Although Substack has created a nice platform for writers to host their writing, writers from developing countries are excluded from earning. This is because Substack uses Stripe to manage financial transactions. Stripe doesn't serve many developing countries.

Hundreds of thousands of writers from developing countries like me pour our hearts and hours into our work and we are inequitably excluded from reward and compensation.

I was sick of reading complaints so I started a petition:

Substack should either create an alternative payment provider to serve our regions or persuade Stripe to partner with payment providers that serve developing countries.

If you'd like writing to be my job, please click this link to sign the petition:

https://chng.it/TLK66Bwnkm