A life told through music.

Fear was joined by the abandonment he felt around the crisis. Support seemed thin just when life demanded more of it. Rage came from powerlessness; darkness from imagining his father’s absence; hunger from refusing to let the sacrifice of leaving home become meaningless. Treatment continued beyond this year. There was no completed recovery to claim in 2024—only diagnosis, treatment, distance, and waiting.

Earlier chapters had taught him to change his image, leave false loyalty, preserve memory, and bring work into the open. None of those changes could make his father well. The crisis reached beneath the question of whether TheIssa would be recognized and into a more frightening one: who would still be there to share the life he was trying to build?

“Healthy Sums,” released on Sleeping Dragon II: Fledging Phoenix on June 19, sits inside that pressure. Health, family, housing, education, identity, and the need to keep creating were all making demands at once. Songs and images offered refuge, but the abundance of possible work could scatter the attention needed to finish. Institutional resistance added to the strain; he felt his deficits were assessed more readily than his labor or capacity was acknowledged.

For once, acknowledgment was not even an imaginable solution to the deepest problem. No recognition could replace time with his father. The life he wanted still mattered, but the assumption beneath it—that the people he loved would be waiting when he finally arrived—could no longer hold. He left this chapter without an answer, carrying a different question into every ambition that followed.