I
haven’t been writing.
I’ve
been paging in at blogs that used to be my regular habitat… like a voyeur…
staring in through windows. Some of them
stained glass and breathtaking, some with gell clings letting light shine
through in colorful splashes, some quaint, some gritty, and all beautiful.
I
was out with a friend a few weeks back and someone asked me what I did for a
living, and I kind of froze… trying I guess to figure out how to explain my
job, which encompasses a lot of things, from data entry to report coallation to
web design… and my friend said, “She’s a writer.”
I
swear to you, I turned around to see who the hell she was talking about.
Oh,
yeah. Me. I think that’s me. Or it used to be me.
I’ve
done that a few times over the past few months – paged up old blogs or facebook
statuses, and read something I said a year ago… and then I remember, I was a
writer. I’ve picked up books, and fallen
into them like I’ve found the only place that I could ever rest my head, and
then I remember, oh yeah, I was a writer.
In the middle of a rather hectic day, with no break in sight, brand new
shiny idea popped right into my head, like the urge to get these people down on
the page never abandoned me… of course, I couldn’t stop what I was doing to
encourage it, but still, it was better than the silence.
Oh
my God the fucking silence.
If
any of you ever heard of Padre Pio, he was a monk, now a saint… I once read
that he said he knew what hell was. It
wasn’t fire and brimstone and demons assailing you. It was the absence of God. It was not being able to feel Him, to hear
Him, to know He was with you. It was the
silence.
And
I’m sure some people will read this and think, “Really, you’re comparing
telling stories to God?” Yeah, I
am. And it’s not some sappy bit about
the muse being divine and these stories being salvation… but the absence of it,
the loss of that compulsion, it’s like they took all the air out of the
room. You don’t even think about air
when you’re breathing fine, it’s about the only thing you can think of when
you’re drowning, though.
There
are a million lofty sentiments people throw at you when you’re not doing so
well. “God never gives you more than you
can handle.”
The
fuck He doesn’t. Why do you think people
drink themselves stupid or throw themselves in front of trains? More than they could handle, I’d say. And I used to think, somewhere deep down
where the real scared little shit who makes up excuses for why the boogy man
could never get me lives, that those people were weak, or quitters, or
something. Something I wasn’t.
I
always love stories about underdogs. I
love it, in real life and in fiction, when someone beats the odds, fights their
way through, finds their happy ending against great odds. No one ever tells you
how to see the beauty in failing. The
truth is, most people fail. Some
gracefully, some kicking and screaming, some taking as many people with them as
they can grab onto.
So
the blog’s been silent. My head’s been
silent. Maybe it’s just a down cycle… or
a reflective year. And I don’t think I
care so much if I fail anymore… but I’d really rather do it with the voices in
my head chattering away again.
