A life told through music.

The work brought the earlier selves into the same frame: the friend unable to prevent Derek’s separation, the grandson trying to preserve a disappearing generation, the artist stepping out of retreat, and the son studying overseas while his father underwent treatment. They were not separate characters he could put away once a chapter ended. Their unfinished demands were still present in the life he was organizing.

This was also the year his father was cured of the cancer diagnosed in 2024. The fear that had stretched across those years could finally release its grip. Recovery did not return the time spent apart or erase the rage, isolation, and abandonment TheIssa had felt. But the future no longer had to be imagined entirely beneath the possibility of losing his father.

Here the direction of the story changed. His grandmother’s death had taught him that love could become memory; his father’s recovery made the time still available feel newly urgent. The point was not to abandon ambition. It was to stop treating life with the people he loved as something that could begin after the ambition was fulfilled.

For years, so much energy had gone into becoming undeniable—to institutions, to people who had withdrawn their respect, even to himself. Now the work needed to do more than answer their judgment. It needed to carry a life: finished music, images worth remembering, sustainable creative work, and room for the son, friend, and family member alongside the artist. The dream had not become smaller. Its purpose had become clearer.

“Ever Wonder,” the unreleased song selected for this chapter, belongs at that turn. There was still preparation ahead, and no single realization could finish it for him. But selecting, rehearsing, asking for support, and completing the next honest piece now pointed toward something more than escape or vindication. The Sleeping Dragon could no longer remain only a refuge. What had kept him alive inside had to become something he could bring back into the world.