The dunes stripped me down to almost nothing.
No noise. No applause. No opening. No city. Just wind pushing against the shack hard enough some nights I thought the walls might give out. Sand in my clothes. Salt on everything. Long walks carrying groceries like some forgotten pilgrim trying to keep a fire alive at the edge of the world.
I did not paint at all during the dune shack residency.
That was the plan.
But somewhere in the isolation something cracked open. The paintings became scenes. The sketchbooks became dialogue. Characters started arriving at impossible hours. I would wake up in darkness with lines in my head and have to write them down before the ocean took them back.
People romanticize the dune shacks but they are brutal places in the best way. They remove performance from your life. There is nobody to impress out there. Nobody watching. You are left alone with your talent and your fear and whatever truth you have been avoiding.
I think that is why the musical happened.
Not because I planned it. Because I could not escape it.
It came out in a fever. Two sleepless nights and one beautiful one where everything suddenly aligned. Barely eating. Barely thinking. Just chasing something that felt bigger than me before it disappeared again. Scene after scene pouring out like it had been trapped inside me for years waiting for silence loud enough to finally emerge.
The winter paintings were already carrying the weight of loneliness, longing, fracture, survival. Then spring walked through the door of the story and suddenly these characters started breathing beside me in the shack. I stopped feeling like I was inventing them. I felt like I was listening to them.
I did not write the music out there. Not yet.
What I wrote was the book. The libretto. The bones of something alive. The conversations. The heartbreak. The longing. The ache between people trying to love each other while barely surviving themselves.
Some nights I would stare at the blank walls all day and write until sunrise. Other nights I would stare out into complete darkness wondering if I had finally lost my mind entirely. Maybe that is part of making something real. Maybe every meaningful thing begins with someone alone in a room hearing voices nobody else can hear yet.
What came out of that shack changed me.
Not because I wrote a musical. But because for the first time in a long time I stopped separating the parts of myself. The painter, the writer, the romantic, the disaster, the dreamer. They all ended up sitting at the same table together out there in the dunes.
And somehow, against all odds, they made something alive.