I just finished writing a sentence that kicked me in the stomach.
Sometimes when I write a story l I feel like I’ve been locked in a fighting cage with myself, and I’m searching for pressure points and nerve endings. If I find the things that hurt me, then I find what matters to me. I know what truth feels like because even as I try to hide the answers from myself my stomach doesn’t lie. My throat, sticky and full of pressure, doesn’t lie.
I've long stopped denying that I'm writing about myself and I've long stopped denying that my ego is an endless hole and I am an explorer into a void of inconsequential infinity that is the self. But I write like me, because I can't write like you, but I know that we're similar enough, and occasionally in the darkness of our spaces I hope that the beams of our flashlights will occasionally cross or we will wave at each other from the little space stations that we have built out of the rickety but brilliant engineering of consciousness. That's what writing is, isn't it? Hello.
I’m selfish to the end. Even when I read your book I do not read it as you, I read it as me. Every word I know and every image in my head I have lovingly constructed from the complex multitudes of my experiences and personality. My internal library of experiences unfolds upon a page called "love" and to me love is like looking down to see that someone has slipped a pair of scissors into your kidneys but it is also an aquatic experience in which I am folded in on myself like a sleeping sea anemone as the pressure of water soothes me. And it smells like cigarettes and tastes like Redbull and it's watching a puppy run straight for an ocean wave. It is waiting for a sunset that I can't see, not quite, but can smell like a florid and bright perfume. I find a page called "Life" and there are molecules crashing into each other, millions of years of evolution zooming through space and time to share experience of eating pizza and smoking weed on an incomprehensibly large rock hurtling day after day after day around a life-machine called a star. But I also think of Dante's Inferno when I think of "Life", and I think of an obscure little French existentialist novel called “Hell” by Henri Barbusse. I think of heroin addicts and lonely mothers writhing in pain, and dark attics where wolf-children live with only black crayons for their coloring books.
And the more you live, and the more you read, the more the words expand like the geometric folds of origami, with continuous and unceasing layers.
I’m used to it hurting now. I’m no stranger to crying at the keyboard. Writing to me is a full body experience. Sometimes I twist my hips into the desk and tense up my shoulders and lay my head down on the desk and type with tight fingers. I imagine that sometimes I look like a mother throwing herself on the casket of her son, or a seasick voyager clutching the railing of a boat. I spell out words with my fingers in the air or mouth them as I think my characters would or move as I think they would. If I could write in any position it’d be curled up in a fetal ball on my bed, writing with my mind’s eye, able to toss and turn as I pleased. Maybe in the future, when augmented reality means I’m no longer attached to a keyboard.
I used to be embarrassed if anyone caught me doing this - now, I’m thankful that I can write mostly in solitude. And I understand it's all part of the process, trying to add my words into emotional memory.
One time I had a therapist who gave me a bunch of slips of paper with different core values attached to them. Things like, “Self-Discovery,” “Kindness,” “Religion.” She told me to pick out 5-7 that mattered most to me. I picked out the usual suspects, like Creativity and Love.
I did not know how badly I wanted a family until my eyes fell upon the card with the word. Family.
Family.
It tied me up in knots because I had hidden it from myself.
I want a family. I want MY family.
I want to love my family.
I want to know that I have a home and the home is in my heart and I have enough love to go around that I don’t feel the need to hoard it all to myself.
Family.
The goal is to keep writing about the things that hurt so they can lead me to the hidden paths that I’ve buried with sticky, sloughed away skin and perfume that smells like opium and dead leaves.
And one day maybe they won’t hurt anymore, but they’ll still be true.
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Stock photo from Pixabay
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