It dies with us. The whole thing dies with us.

Jack Kerouac said there were four essentials for prose:

Accept loss forever.
Be submissive to everything, open, listening.
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge. And,
Be in love with your life.

I looked around me. No one was there. I had no one's approval or permission, and no one cared whether I wrote or not. I asked myself why I write.
I write because I keep my mouth shut a lot and my ego truth is I want to live forever. Not only do I want to live forever, but I want the cup of tea I had this morning to live forever, too, and my left sock and the orange peel and the woman I saw pushing the shopping cart of canned foods. I hurt at my impermanence and at the edge of all my joy, I know all of this will end-the sunny days in spring, my house on Clubhouse Court in Franklin, Tennessee, a perfectville in mythical America. Then no one will know what it was like to breathe here or to stub your toe at the sunset on the hills as the sky moves in layers of color.
I write because I'm broken and hurt and I need to know how to make hurt okay. Rivers run through me, and if I don't allow them to cascade from my fingertips, I'll build a dam. With the fulness I'll die. I'll just implode.

I write because I'm an artist, and I mold my life through my words.
I write because I'm lonely and move through the world alone. If I don't write, no one will ever be able to say that I was here or that they knew me.
I write because I'm submissive. I give back as freely as I have been given, and I want to breathe life into everything I encounter, give it all a new name. I want to recycle everything I know before it's too late and I can't help anyone because if I can't help anyone everything is meaningless.
I'm desperate. This is all I have. I have nothing else.
I write because I'm insane, schizophrenic. I know it and accept it and have to do something before I end up drunk, suicidal, or in a looney bin.
I write because it's dangerous, rebellious, wicked even, and I'm wicked. And writing is the only way to make myself good again, to face my demons and spit in their eyes. It's the only way I can build a temple in three days and move into it. It's the home not made out of wood and stone, and the only one I'm welcome to return to no matter how long I've been gone, and want to. It's the only real home I''ll probably ever have. It's light and it's dark, and I eat it and keep it with me.
And finally, I write out of total incomprehension that love isn't enough and even writing, which might be all I have, it isn't even enough. I can never get it all down. There are times when I have to leave it, when I can't voice the words which tell what happens in my heart, in my bones. I'm left gaping, grasping at thin air for some fragment of a language to relieve myself, but there's nothing, and I'm empty handed. I'm angry. But writing is the only way I can meet myself. It's the only home I have to come to. It's the only place my soul has rest, where all the rivers of this world meet at one point of singularity and nothing exists but everything is here.