The Who of me.

Sometimes I think I’m like Quasimodo – scuttling around in the dark hiding from the real world with this bulge of unused stories on my back. But silence fills the space around me now. It presses against my face smothering the words I’m trying to say. The quietness of time from yesterday has mutated to this stifling nothingness of now. When I speak it should not be futile, nor worthless. The impossibility of saying what’s on my mind, what’s in my heart. If there is such a thing as a soul maybe that’s where the words could form, where they could find the right sequence, could convey my thoughts. Grammatically dramatic and instinctively persuasive they would make the listener (or the reader) stop grasping, stop assuming and just know the truth of what I say. In their mind they will see the scenes I’ve painted with words.

My eyes may be closed but I can see. My head may be bowed but I stand tall. The who of me has found itself and what it sees is joy, and sadness, laughter and loneliness. These sensations need to be exposed and critiqued, now, before they become old ideas to be dealt with by an aging brain that forgets more than it remembers. Ideas that would be made irrelevant by a mumbling, drooling writer that never understood that what you write is not as important as why you do. I fear that the why of me may never be known.

Words and themes, plots and deceit, covert twisting of the truth, clever use of words, accidental brilliance. All these things drive the urge to pull images from the temporal neurons in my brain and expose them to scrutiny. I need to cage them, massage and coerce them to create pleasure or anxiety or wonder. I could accept ridicule, be dismissed as irrelevant or worse as long as the words flow and the storytelling pours from my head, through my fingers and into the world. To meld my congested thoughts seamlessly with the long blank periods where nothing moves in my head. Sometimes my brain just sits empty and I’m fearful that maybe now it’s really been purged of any original thoughts.

Words without order and grammar are pointless, sentences without a reason to be spoken or read are worse. The story should draw you close, keep you involved while relaying new ideas, teaching new skills, fulfilling fantasy, making you laugh or cry, transporting you to another place and time.

Some stories are like the first few months with a new lover, with hormones raging you just can’t get enough and every minute apart seems like hours. Other stories are more the comfortable, easy bond of a 20-year relationship – you know what’s going to happen before you turn the page. I want to write the former.

So I sit at my desk and start.

“I’m in the cafeteria, the gunman’s moving towards me”. Hmm, No, that doesn’t work; lets try again “Its sort of kinky being naked in the forest”. No, can’t get moving on that one either. How about “It was a dark and stormy night”. That’s got potential but I’m sure its been done before. I lift my hands from the keyboard and sigh.

I’m infatuated with writing, in love with the process; I yearn for a happy outcome. To have the power writing gives me. But it will have to be another day, this one just isn’t going to work.